Antisocial pool rewarding does not deter public cooperation
Attila Szolnoki, Matjaz Perc

TL;DR
This study investigates how antisocial and prosocial pool rewarding influence public cooperation, revealing that antisocial rewards do not undermine cooperation if prosocial rewards are also available, especially with spatial aggregation.
Contribution
It demonstrates that antisocial rewarding does not hinder cooperation when prosocial rewards are present, highlighting the importance of spatial aggregation in promoting cooperation.
Findings
Antisocial rewards do not deter cooperation if prosocial rewards are also available.
Spatial aggregation enhances the effectiveness of both prosocial and antisocial rewards.
Aggregated antisocial rewards are ultimately ineffective due to defectors' inability to sustain public goods.
Abstract
Rewarding cooperation is in many ways expected behaviour from social players. However, strategies that promote antisocial behaviour are also surprisingly common, not just in human societies, but also among eusocial insects and bacteria. Examples include sanctioning of individuals who behave prosocially, or rewarding of freeriders who do not contribute to collective enterprises. We therefore study the public goods game with antisocial and prosocial pool rewarding in order to determine the potential negative consequences on the effectiveness of positive incentives to promote cooperation. Contrary to a naive expectation, we show that the ability of defectors to distribute rewards to their like does not deter public cooperation as long as cooperators are able to do the same. Even in the presence of antisocial rewarding the spatial selection for cooperation in evolutionary social dilemmas is…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
