IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-00105849.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Cooperation and free riding with moral cost

Author

Listed:
  • Denis Phan

    (CREM - Centre de recherche en économie et management - UNICAEN - Université de Caen Normandie - NU - Normandie Université - UR - Université de Rennes - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

We study social organizations withpossible coexistence at equilibrium ofcooperating individuals and pure consumers(free-riders). We investigate this polymorphicequilibrium using a game-theoretic approach anda statistical physics analysis of a simple model.The agents face a binary decision problem:whether to contribute or not to the public good,through the maximization of an additive utilitythat has two competing terms, a fixed cost forcooperating and an idiosyncratic moral cost forfree-riding proportional to the fraction ofcooperators. We study the equilibria regimes ofthis model. We show that there is a fraction ofexpected cooperators below which cooperationfails to emerge. Besides the homogeneous stableequilibria (everybody cooperates or everybodyfree-rides), it exists a solution in whichcooperators coexist with free-riders. Thispolymorphic equilibrium is a consequence of theheterogeneous (idiosyncratic) perceptions of thesocial reproval by the different individuals. Weprovide analytic results in the case of a simpledistribution of the idiosyncratic moral weights,and discuss them on the basis of concepts ofgame theory.

Suggested Citation

  • Denis Phan, 2005. "Cooperation and free riding with moral cost," Post-Print halshs-00105849, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00105849
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Y. P. Ma & S. Gonçalves & S. Mignot & J.-P. Nadal & M. B. Gordon, 2009. "Cycles of cooperation and free-riding in social systems," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 71(4), pages 597-610, October.
    2. Roger Waldeck, 2016. "Modeling criminality: the impact of emotions, norms and interaction structures," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 22(2), pages 135-160, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00105849. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.