National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA.
Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, 93943, USA.
Sci Rep. 2023 Jan 20;13(1):1160. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-23454-9.
Some human groups are organized hierarchically and some are distributed. Both types of groups occur in economic, political, and military domains, but it is unclear why hierarchical organizations are favored in certain contexts and distributed organizations are favored in others. I propose that these different organizational structures can be explained by human groups having different constraints on their ability to foster cooperation within the group. Human within-group cooperation is often maintained by monitoring and punishment. In hierarchical groups, monitoring and punishment are organized into tree-like command-and-control structures with supervisors responsible for monitoring the cooperation of their subordinates and punishing non-cooperators. By contrast, in distributed groups, monitoring is diffuse and punishment is collective. I propose that the organization of cooperative human groups is constrained by the costs of monitoring and punishment. I formalize this hypothesis with a model where individuals in a group cooperate to produce public goods while embedded in a network of monitoring and punishment responsibilities. I show that, when punishment costs are high and monitoring costs are low, socially-optimal monitoring and punishment networks are distributed. The size of these distributed networks is constrained by monitoring costs. However, when punishment costs are low, socially-optimal networks are hierarchical. Monitoring costs do not constrain the size of hierarchical networks but determine how many levels of supervision are required to foster cooperation in the hierarchical group. These results may explain the increasingly large and hierarchical groups throughout much of human history. They also suggest that the recent emergence of large-scale distributed organizations has been possible because new technologies, like the internet, have made monitoring costs extremely low.
有些人类群体是分层组织的，有些则是分布式的。这两种类型的群体都存在于经济、政治和军事领域，但尚不清楚为什么在某些情况下分层组织受到青睐，而在其他情况下分布式组织受到青睐。我提出，这些不同的组织结构可以通过人类群体在促进群体内部合作的能力上的不同限制来解释。人类群体内部的合作通常通过监控和惩罚来维持。在分层群体中，监控和惩罚组织成树状的指挥和控制结构，监督者负责监控下属的合作情况并惩罚不合作的人。相比之下，在分布式群体中，监控是分散的，惩罚是集体的。我提出，合作的人类群体的组织受到监控和惩罚成本的限制。我通过一个模型将这个假设形式化，在这个模型中，个体在群体中合作生产公共物品，同时嵌入在监控和惩罚责任的网络中。我表明，当惩罚成本高而监控成本低时，社会最优的监控和惩罚网络是分布式的。这些分布式网络的规模受到监控成本的限制。然而，当惩罚成本低时，社会最优的网络是分层的。监控成本不限制分层网络的规模，但决定了在分层群体中需要多少级别的监督来促进合作。这些结果可能解释了人类历史上大部分时间里越来越大的分层群体的出现。它们还表明，由于新技术（如互联网）使监控成本变得极低，最近大规模分布式组织的出现是可能的。
