Context-sensitive norm enforcement reduces sanctioning costs in spatial public goods games

Lee, Hsuan-Wei and Cleveland, Colin and Szolnoki, Attila (2025) Context-sensitive norm enforcement reduces sanctioning costs in spatial public goods games. APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTATION, 508. ISSN 0096-3003

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Abstract

Uniform punishment policies can sustain cooperation in social dilemmas but impose severe costs on en- forcers, creating a second-order free-rider problem that undermines the very mechanism designed to prevent exploitation. We show that the remedy is not a harsher stick but a smarter one. In a four-strategy spatial public-goods game we pit conventional punishers, who levy a fixed fine, against norm-responsive punishers that double both fine and cost only when at least half of their current group already cooperates. Extensive large scale Monte Carlo simulations on lattices demonstrate that context-sensitive punishment achieves com- plete defector elimination at fine levels 8% lower than uniform enforcement, despite identical marginal costs per sanctioning event. The efficiency gain emerges because norm-responsive punishers conserve resources in defector-dominated regions while concentrating intensified sanctions at cooperative-defector boundaries, creating self-reinforcing fronts that amplify the spread of prosocial behavior. These findings reveal that en- forcement efficiency can be dramatically improved by targeting punishment at cooperative-defector interfaces rather than applying uniform sanctions, offering quantitative guidelines for designing adaptive regulatory mechanisms that maximize compliance while minimizing institutional costs.

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