Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/167937 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Citation: 
[Journal:] Games [ISSN:] 2073-4336 [Volume:] 6 [Issue:] 2 [Publisher:] MDPI [Place:] Basel [Year:] 2015 [Pages:] 124-149
Publisher: 
MDPI, Basel
Abstract: 
Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually-administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the ability to control how quickly legal rules of punishment evolve relative to social behavior that legal punishment regulates. However, at what rate should legal rules evolve relative to society to maximize compliance? We investigate this question by modeling the co-evolution of law and cooperation in a public goods game with centralized punishment. We vary the rate at which States update their legal punishment strategy relative to Citizens' updating of their contribution strategy and observe the effect on Citizen cooperation. We find that when States have unlimited resources, slower State updating lead to more Citizen cooperation: by updating more slowly, States force Citizens to adapt to the legal punishment rules. When States depend on Citizens to finance their punishment activities, however, we find evidence of a "Goldilocks" effect: optimal compliance is achieved when legal rules evolve at a critical evolutionary rate that is slow enough to force citizens to adapt, but fast enough to enable states to quickly respond to outbreaks of citizen lawlessness.
Subjects: 
social evolution
cooperation
punishment
institutions
JEL: 
C00
C60
C70
C72
C73
E61
H41
K00
K20
N00
P00
Z10
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
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