A recent experimental study of Cai and Wang (2005) on strategic information transmission reveals that subjects tend to transmit more information than predicted by the standard equilibrium analysis. To evidence that this overcommunication phenomenon can be explained in terms of a tension between normative social behavior and incentives for lying, we show in a simple sender-receiver game that sub...

Punishing Free-Riders: How Group Size Affects Mutual Monitoring and the Provision of Public Goods Because costly punishment is not credible, subgame perfection suggests that punishment will not deter free riding, regardless of the size or structure of groups. However, experiments show that people will punish free riders, even at considerable cost. To examine the implications of agents who punis...

Both laboratory and field data suggest that people punish noncooperators even in one-shot interactions. Although such "altruistic punishment" may explain the high levels of cooperation in human societies, it creates an evolutionary puzzle: existing models suggest that altruistic cooperation among nonrelatives is evolutionarily stable only in small groups. Thus, applying such models to the evolu...

This essay puts forward a cruise pricing model based on improved quantum particle swarm optimization, aiming at optimizing the pricing strategy and realizing the maximum sales income expected. Firstly, we combine the two factors – actual booking records and expected booking records in the process of cruises pricing – and improve the dynamic price-setting model based on demand learning put forwa...

While there is a vast literature about the consequences of corruption, research focused on the causes of non-corrupt governments is still nascent. Electoral accountability is one important means of changing existing corruption dynamics in government, and one potential way of punishing corrupt elected officials is to give voters information about the corrupt behavior. In a randomized field exper...

Human readiness to incur personal costs to punish norm violators is a key force in the maintenance of social norms. The willingness to punish is, however, characterized by vast individual heterogeneity that is poorly understood. In fact, this heterogeneity has so far defied explanations in terms of individual-level demographic or psychological variables. Here, we use resting electroencephalogra...

Much of human cooperation remains an evolutionary riddle. Unlike other animals, people frequently cooperate with non-relatives in large groups. Evolutionary models of large-scale cooperation require not just incentives for cooperation, but also a credible disincentive for free riding. Various theoretical solutions have been proposed and experimentally explored, including reputation monitoring a...

The norm game (NG) introduced by Robert Axelrod is a convenient frame to disccuss the time evolution of the level of preserving norms in social systems. Recently NG was formulated in terms of a social contagion on a model social network with two stable states: defectors or punishers. Here we calculate the critical line between these states on the plane of parameters, which measure the severitie...

Different people make different responses when they face a frustrating situation: some punish others (extrapunitive), while others punish themselves (intropunitive). Few studies have investigated the neural structures that differentiate extrapunitive and intropunitive individuals. The present fMRI study explored these neural structures using two different frustrating situations: an ego-blocking...

Companies spend enormous resources on customer relationship management (CRM), but there is no clear understanding on two seemingly simple, but critical questions: (1) Should firms reward or punish their current customers? (2) Can CRM be profitable in a competitive setting? While CRM practitioners are enthusiastic about its win-win potential for firms and customers, the extant theoretical litera...