A double-edged sword: Benefits and pitfalls of heterogeneous punishment in evolutionary inspection games

Abstract

As a simple model for criminal behavior, the traditional two-strategy inspection game yields counterintuitive results that fail to describe empirical data. The latter shows that crime is often recurrent, and that crime rates do not respond linearly to mitigation attempts. A more apt model entails ordinary people who neither commit nor sanction crime as the third strategy besides the criminals and punishers. Since ordinary people free-ride on the sanctioning efforts of punishers, they may introduce cyclic dominance that enables the coexistence of all three competing strategies. In this setup ordinary individuals become the biggest impediment to crime abatement. We therefore also consider heterogeneous punisher strategies, which seek to reduce their investment into fighting crime in order to attain a more competitive payoff. We show that this diversity of punishment leads to an explosion of complexity in the system, where the benefits and pitfalls of criminal behavior are revealed in the most unexpected ways. Due to the raise and fall of different alliances no less than six consecutive phase transitions occur in dependence on solely the temptation to succumb to criminal behavior, leading the population from ordinary people-dominated across punisher-dominated to crime-dominated phases, yet always failing to abolish crime completely.

9 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Scientific Reports

References in corpus (18)

• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Evolutionary games on graphs
• Social diversity and promotion of cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game
• Reward and cooperation in the spatial public goods game
• Cyclic dominance in evolutionary games: A review
• The Matthew effect in empirical data
• Punish, but not too hard: How costly punishment spreads in the spatial public goods game
• Phase diagrams for the spatial public goods game with pool-punishment
• Evolutionary establishment of moral and double moral standards through spatial interactions
• Cooperation in noisy case: prisoner's dilemma game on two types of regular random graphs
• Resolving social dilemmas on evolving random networks
• Probabilistic sharing solves the problem of costly punishment
• Statistical physics of crime: A review
• Evolutionary advantages of adaptive rewarding
• If players are sparse social dilemmas are too: Importance of percolation for evolution of cooperation
• Zero-one survival behavior of cyclically competing species
• Dynamically generated cyclic dominance in spatial prisoner's dilemma games
• Cooperation percolation in spatial prisoner's dilemma game

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Social physics
• Evolutionary dynamics in the public goods games with switching between punishment and exclusion
• The self-organizing impact of averaged payoffs on the evolution of cooperation
• The robustness of interdependent networks under the interplay between cascading failures and virus propagation
• Involution game with spatio-temporal heterogeneity of social resources
• Group-size dependent synergy in heterogeneous populations
• Heterogeneous contributions can jeopardize cooperation in the Public Goods Game
• Interactive diversity disrupts cyclic dominance but maintains cooperation in spatial social dilemma games
• Evolutionary dynamics of organised crime and terrorist networks
• Context-sensitive norm enforcement reduces sanctioning costs in spatial public goods games
• Anomalous behavior of Replicator dynamics for the Prisoner's Dilemma on diluted lattices
• Finite Population Dynamics Resolve the Central Paradox of the Inspection Game