Altruistic punishment, social structure and the enforcement of social norms

Abstract

In many social dilemmas, individuals are each better off acting in their own best interest. Social norms provide a mechanism by which group level order can emerge. Often the enforcement of a social norm requires some altruistic punishment. In this paper I explore the role of social structure in the emergence of group level order, in a variation of n-person Prisoners Dilemma played out on a network. The results from this study show that clustering plays an important role in the formation of cohesive groups. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.