The cultural foundations of cooperation enforcement
本文通过博弈论模型解释文化差异如何影响人们使用声誉、互惠和报复来维持合作，并用全球历史与当代数据验证了理论。
The human ability to maintain large-scale cooperation despite individual incentives for defection is as perplexing as it is universal. Although research has identified several mechanisms as potential solutions to this puzzle, empirical evidence robustly shows that societies rely on vastly different enforcement practices to achieve cooperative outcomes. The paper addresses this poorly understood phenomenon by developing a game-theoretical model that links cultural differences to incentives to utilize reputation, reciprocity, and revenge to elicit cooperative behavior. The model shows that reputational enforcement is favored by large temporal discounting, group-bound morality, and high degrees of dyadic reciprocity. In contrast, revenge is supported by honor beliefs and cultural long-term orientations, while being inhibited by a greater reliance on reciprocal relationships. A comprehensive empirical evaluation of these predictions across two global datasets spanning different historical periods provides strong support for the theory. The identified relationships are robust across preindustrial societies and a newly compiled dataset of contemporary sub-national regions, suggesting that the proposed framework captures general mechanisms underlying cross-cultural variation in cooperation enforcement.