title: Indirect reciprocity can overcome free-rider problems on costly moral assessment.
abstract: Indirect reciprocity is one of the major mechanisms of the evolution of cooperation. Because constant monitoring and accurate evaluation in moral assessments tend to be costly, indirect reciprocity can be exploited by cost evaders. A recent study crucially showed that a cooperative state achieved by indirect reciprocators is easily destabilized by cost evaders in the case with no supportive mechanism. Here, we present a simple and widely applicable solution that considers pre-assessment of cost evaders. In the pre-assessment, those who fail to pay for costly assessment systems are assigned a nasty image that leads to them being rejected by discriminators. We demonstrate that considering the pre-assessment can crucially stabilize reciprocal cooperation for a broad range of indirect reciprocity models. In particular for the most leading social norms, we analyse the conditions under which a prosocial state becomes locally stable.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Mathematics, University of Vienna, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090 Vienna, Austria tatsuya.sasaki@univie.ac.at.
authors.forename: Tatsuya
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-4635-1389
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sasaki
authors.affiliation: Department of Business Administration, Soka University, 1-236 Tangi-cho, Hachioji-city, Tokyo 192-8577, Japan.
authors.forename: Isamu
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-9943-2668
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Okada
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Systems Engineering and Science, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Fukasaku 2307, Minuma-ku, Saitama-city, Saitama 337-8570, Japan.
authors.forename: Yutaka
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Nakai
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005716:Game Theory; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009014:Morals; D011678:Punishment; D012925:Social Conformity
keywords: evolution of cooperation; indirect reciprocity; pool punishment; replicator dynamics; second-order free-rider; social norm