ǂA ǂdouble-edged sword

benefits and pitfalls of heterogeneous punishment in evolutionary inspection games

Matjaž Perc (Author), Attila Szolnoki (Author)

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.

Keywords

zločin;fazni prehod;socialna dilema;fizika socioloških sistemov;crime;phase transition;social dilemma;physics of social systems;

Data

Language:	English
Year of publishing:	2015
Typology:	1.01 - Original Scientific Article
Organization:	UM FNM - Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
UDC:	53
COBISS:	21450504
ISSN:	2045-2322
Views:	638
Downloads:	355
Average score:	0 (0 votes)
Metadata:

Other data

Secondary language:	Slovenian
Secondary keywords:	zločin;fazni prehod;socialna dilema;fizika socioloških sistemov;
URN:	URN:SI:UM:
Type (COBISS):	Scientific work
Pages:	str. 1-11
Volume:	ǂVol. ǂ5
Issue:	ǂart. no. ǂ11027
Chronology:	2015
DOI:	10.1038/srep11027
ID:	9142747