The demand for punishment to promote cooperation among like-minded people

Social preferences in the public goods game–An Agent-Based simulation with EconSim

“…The experimental results of [20]'s public goods game with controlled group formation and endogenous formal punishment indicate heterogeneous behavior of different subject groups in similar situations. While groups of "low cooperators" need punishment institutions to enforce cooperation, "high cooperators" act in a socially beneficial way even without punishment.…”

“…In our paper, we show that reinforcement learning can replicate human behavior. For that reason, we construct a model of social preferences and use it in an agent-based simulation of a public goods game with a setting similar to the design of [20]. Our model consists of different motives that may explain the behavior observed in the experiment.…”

“…By weighting these motives, we create utility functions embodying different preference structures, incorporated into our agents. With reinforcement learning, homogenous agents learn to play their optimal strategies in three punishment settings replicating the behavior of the human subjects in [20]. Reinforcement learning is a trial-and-error learning paradigm, based on the principle of operant conditioning, assuming learners evaluate actions by trying them and getting rewards as feedback.…”

“…Further contributions of our paper are the replication of the public goods game of [20] in an agent-based simulation and the introduction of a newly combined social preference model. Additionally, we show that human behavior in public good experiments can be replicated using simple motives with only a few parameters.…”

“…Instead, we reproduce several comparable Petri dishes with our model of social preferences and a reinforcement-learning algorithm as ingredients. [20] combine endogenous punishment institutions in the public goods game ("institution formation game") with a sorting mechanism based on participants' previous contributions in a one-shot public goods game ("sorting game"). Thereby, homogeneous groups of participants with similar ex-ante cooperation levels play the public goods game, in which they can vote for punishment institutions.…”