Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
8254851 | Chaos, Solitons & Fractals | 2015 | 5 Pages |
Abstract
Punishment has been proved to be an effective mechanism to sustain cooperation among selfish individuals. In previous studies, punishment is unidirectional: an individual i can punish j but j cannot punish i. In this paper, we propose a mechanism of mutual punishment, in which the two individuals will punish each other if their strategies are different. Because of the symmetry in imposing the punishment, one might expect intuitively the strategy to have little effect on cooperation. Surprisingly, we find that the mutual punishment can promote cooperation in the spatial public goods game. Other pertinent quantities such as the time evolution of cooperator density and the spatial distribution of cooperators and defectors are also investigated.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering
Physics and Astronomy
Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Authors
Han-Xin Yang, Zhihai Rong,