Evolutionary Dynamics of Cooperation in a Corrupt Society with Anti-Corruption Control

Abstract

The importance of cooperation is self-evident to humans, yet the existence of corruption where law violators can avoid being punished by paying bribes to corrupt law enforcers may threaten the maintenance of cooperation. Although powerful monitoring has been used to resolve such matters, existing studies show that the effects of such measures are either transient or uncertain. Thus how to efficiently control the occurrence of corruption for the emergence of cooperation remains a challenge. Here, we introduce social exclusion into the public goods game, and respectively propose three measures to control corruption, namely, the exclusion of corrupt punishers, the exclusion of corrupt defectors, and the exclusion of both corrupt punishers and corrupt defectors. Our results show that the system dynamics driven by these three measures can exhibit many interesting dynamical outcomes including the dominance of defectors, rock-scissors-paper cycle, heteroclinic cycle, or interior attractor. We further demonstrate that excluding corrupt punishers can improve the situation of corruption more efficiently than excluding corrupt defectors. In addition, excluding both corrupt defectors and corrupt punishers can more effectively promote the emergence of cooperation for a broad parameter range.