Cooperation Works if Majority Can Punish Freeloaders

plasmid writes: "Some Swiss economists ran an investment game... they found that if the majority could punish freeloaders, cooperation flourished. I think this has implications for cooperative peer-to-peer systems and, to a lesser extent, for open source development. I'm so inspired I plan to go out an punish someone right now, as a matter of fact." I had just read this article the other day (go memepool), so this Nature piece seems oddly apropos.

Comments

holy crap, we're human...

[TheQuantumShift]

I myself kill every single upload I see going out of my gnutella client, the main reason is that I need all the bandwidth I can get for my own selfish pleasure. But also, when I kill these uploads, I always get a little satisfaction of ha, you're not getting that from me. I know this goes against the whole P2P concept, and if I had a T anything instead of 674k/sec DSL, I think I'd let all those uploads alone. But then again, I'm not on gnutella 24 hours a day looking for beastiality-teen-incest-orgy.mpg, I only look for those hard to find Skinny Puppy songs. But my point is, as long as helping others puts you at a disadvantage, people will always choose themselves. It's our nature. Of course we know we suck, but as humans we have the luxury of not giving a shit.

censorware.org as a case study - SERIOUS

[Seth Finkelstein]

[Let's see how long this article lasts with a positive score ...]

I've been wrestling with the article's issue, on a game-theoretic level, for years. For example, many people simply do not understand what I say when I discuss the events and aftermath of
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

It's far deeper than ego or "personal", which are superficial reactions I get. In game-theory, the Prisoner's Dilemma teaches us that that individuals have an incentive to defect in terms of cooperative resources. Now, having said that, what then? What follows? How does one go about organizing a cooperative venture with this knowledge in mind?

To quote the article:

When penalties were allowed, the common good prevailed, and the investment by each group member climbed. "But if there's no opportunity for punishment, cooperation unravels," says Fehr, with investment declining rapidly.

This is the exact argument I made passionately regarding the necessity of making there be some penalty for Michael Sims' actions in destroying censorware.org. It's the flip side of enlightened self-interest. Cooperation cannot be supported if someone can defect without penalty. But:

In some games, players could then fine each other, but they had to pay a small sum for this.

Indeed. It's not costless to create downsides. This makes it tempting to ignore their role in maintaining cooperation. They're unpleasant, to say the least.

But what if it's nigh-impossible to have a penalty? This is an aspect where I think about "the power of journalism". As a programmer who has worked with journalists (many times unhappily), I'm acutely aware that as a general rule, journalists can harm me with manipulated coverage, much more than I can punish them via semi-futile protests about their actions. This is in fact my number-one publicity worry about anti-censorware work and how I'd ever get covered nowadays in Slashdot if I ever were to be sued like Dmitry Sklyarov.

So in the end, I don't have a solution. But the implications of this problem are NOT abstract, in fact are very immediate.