Punishing and Abstaining for Public Goods

The evolution of cooperation within sizeable groups of non-related humans offers many challenges for our understanding. Current research has highlighted two factors boosting cooperation in public goods interactions, namely costly punishment of defectors, and the option to defer from the joint enterprise. A recent modeling approach has suggested that the autarctic option acts as a catalyzer for the ultimate fixation of altruistic punishment. We present an alternative, more micro-economically based model which yields a bistable outcome instead. Evolutionary dynamics can either lead to a Nash equilibrium of punishing and non-punishing cooperators, or to an oscillating state without punishers.

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