title: Antisocial pool rewarding does not deter public cooperation.
abstract: Rewarding cooperation is in many ways expected behaviour from social players. However, strategies that promote antisocial behaviour are also surprisingly common, not just in human societies, but also among eusocial insects and bacteria. Examples include sanctioning of individuals who behave prosocially, or rewarding of free-riders who do not contribute to collective enterprises. We therefore study the public goods game with antisocial and prosocial pool rewarding in order to determine the potential negative consequences on the effectiveness of positive incentives to promote cooperation. Contrary to a naive expectation, we show that the ability of defectors to distribute rewards to their like does not deter public cooperation as long as cooperators are able to do the same. Even in the presence of antisocial rewarding, the spatial selection for cooperation in evolutionary social dilemmas is enhanced. Since the administration of rewards to either strategy requires a considerable degree of aggregation, cooperators can enjoy the benefits of their prosocial contributions as well as the corresponding rewards. Defectors when aggregated, on the other hand, can enjoy antisocial rewards, but due to their lack of contributions to the public good they ultimately succumb to their inherent inability to secure a sustainable future. Strategies that facilitate the aggregation of akin players, even if they seek to promote antisocial behaviour, thus always enhance the long-term benefits of cooperation.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Technical Physics and Materials Science, Centre for Energy Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, PO Box 49, Budapest 1525, Hungary szolnoki@mfa.kfki.hu.
authors.forename: Attila
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0907-0406
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Szolnoki
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor, Koroška cesta 160, Maribor 2000, Slovenia Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia CAMTP-Center for Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Maribor, Krekova 2, Maribor 2000, Slovenia.
authors.forename: Matjaž
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3087-541X
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Perc
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012201:Reward
keywords: cooperation; evolutionary games; network reciprocity; rewarding; social dilemmas