Abstract
Indirect reciprocity is an important mechanism for resolving social dilemmas. Previous studies explore several types of assessment rules that are evolutionarily stable for keeping cooperation regimes. However, little is known about the effects of private information on social systems. Most indirect reciprocity studies assume public monitoring in which individuals share a single assessment for each individual. Here, we consider a private monitoring system that loosens such an unnatural assumption. We explore the stable norms in the private system using an individual-based simulation. We have three main findings. First, narrow and unstable cooperation: cooperation in private monitoring becomes unstable and the restricted norms cannot maintain cooperative regimes while they can in public monitoring. Second, stable coexistence of discriminators and unconditional cooperators: under private monitoring, unconditional cooperation can play a role in keeping a high level of cooperation in tolerant norm situations. Finally, Pareto improvement: private monitoring can achieve a higher cooperation rate than does public monitoring.
Highlights
The eyes of others make people act morally
Our simulation result shows that the cooperative stable norms are more restricted in private monitoring than those in public monitoring, as shown in Tables 1 and 2. This result shows that the strict norms are not stable in the private monitoring system while they can be in the public monitoring system[33, 37]
The perfect monitoring system seems to achieve the highest level of cooperation, our results surprisingly reveal that the private monitoring system, despite being an imperfect information situation, can achieve a higher level than the public monitoring system
Summary
The eyes of others make people act morally. Even subtle surveillance cues can influence cooperative behavior as shown in a series of social psychological experiments[1,2,3]. We consider indirect reciprocity because assessment rules and moral judgment have been theoretically[8,9,10,11,12,13,14] and empirically[15,16,17,18,19,20] considered in studies on the evolution of cooperation by indirect reciprocity. The norm is vulnerable when errors in both implementation and perception occur and when mutations arise[26] This is because a norm adopter’s defection to a bad player simultaneously hurts her or his own reputation with the other adopters of the norm, and a defecting norm adopter becomes www.nature.com/scientificreports/. To discriminate whether the defection is justified or unjustified, the discriminator needs to consider the recipient’s reputation, which is the second-order information. If the discriminators use both first- and second-order information, justified defection including punishment works
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
