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Context-sensitive norm enforcement reduces sanctioning costs in spatial public goods games
Hsuan-Wei Lee, Colin Cleveland, Attila Szolnoki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04543

Context-sensitive norm enforcement reduces sanctioning costs in spatial public goods games
Uniform punishment policies can sustain cooperation in social dilemmas but impose severe costs on enforcers, creating a second-order free-rider problem that undermines the very mechanism designed to prevent exploitation. We show that the remedy is not a harsher stick but a smarter one. In a four-strategy spatial public-goods game we pit conventional punishers, who levy a fixed fine, against norm-responsive punishers that double both fine and cost only when at least half of their current group a…