Abstract
Indirect reciprocity is often claimed as one of the key mechanisms of human cooperation. It works only if there is a reputational score keeping and each individual can inform with high probability which other individuals were good or bad in the previous round. Gossip is often proposed as a mechanism that can maintain such coherence of reputations in the face of errors of transmission. Random errors, however, are not the only source of uncertainty in such situations. The possibility of deceptive communication, where the signallers aim to misinform the receiver cannot be excluded. While there is plenty of evidence for deceptive communication in humans the possibility of deception is not yet incorporated into models of indirect reciprocity. Here we show that when deceptive strategies are allowed in the population it will cause the collapse of the coherence of reputations and thus in turn it results the collapse of cooperation. This collapse is independent of the norms and the cost and benefit values. It is due to the fact that there is no selection for honest communication in the framework of indirect reciprocity. It follows that indirect reciprocity can be only proposed plausibly as a mechanism of human cooperation if additional mechanisms are specified in the model that maintains honesty.
Highlights
Indirect reciprocity (IR), i.e. repeated encounters between donors and beneficiaries where the donor receives a payback not from the beneficiary itself but later from another individual in the population, is identified to be one of the key mechanisms of human cooperation [1,2,3]
It is well known that for indirect reciprocity to work the reputation of the others have to be known with a certain accuracy [1,2]
Indirect reciprocity crucially depends on the coherence of reputational scores in the population
Summary
Indirect reciprocity (IR), i.e. repeated encounters between donors and beneficiaries where the donor receives a payback not from the beneficiary itself but later from another individual in the population, is identified to be one of the key mechanisms of human cooperation [1,2,3]. It is well known that for indirect reciprocity to work the reputation of the others have to be known with a certain accuracy [1,2]. There has to be a mechanism in the population that maintains the coherence of reputational scores. Gossip is claimed to be one such a mechanism [2, 3]. In a paper Ohtsuki et al [2] have found that by allowing a sufficiently large number of communicational rounds gossip remains robust against erroneous signalling. The second one is the error of implementation, studied by Ohtsuki et al [2] when the signaller sends a wrong signal
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