Effects of interconnections among corruption, institutional punishment, and economic factors for the evolution of cooperation

TL;DR

This paper explores how corruption, leadership strength, and economic potential influence the evolution of cooperation in public goods games, revealing that corruption generally hampers cooperation but strong leaders and economic wealth can promote it.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis combining institutional punishment and bribery games to understand the complex effects of corruption and economic factors on cooperation.

Findings

Corruption reduces cooperation levels when bribery is prevalent.

Stronger leaders and higher economic potential promote cooperation.

Bribery inclination of defectors affects the effectiveness of leadership in sustaining cooperation.

Abstract

The view that altruistic punishment plays an important role in supporting public cooperation among human beings and other species has been widely accepted by the public. However, the positive role of altruistic punishment in enhancing cooperation will be undermined if corruption is considered. Recently, behavioral experiments have confirmed this finding and further investigated the effects of the leader's punitive power and the economic potential. Nevertheless, there are relatively few studies focusing on how these factors affect the evolution of cooperation from a theoretical perspective. Here, we combine institutional punishment public goods games with bribery games to investigate the effects of the above factors on the evolution of cooperation. Theoretical and numerical results reveal that the existence of corruption will reduce the level of cooperation when cooperators are more inclined to provide bribes. In addition, we demonstrate that stronger leader and richer economic potential are both important to enhance cooperation. In particular, when defectors are more inclined to provide bribes, stronger leaders can sustain the contributions of public goods from cooperators if the economic potential is weak.