The Emergence of Cooperation in Public Goods Games on Randomly Growing Dynamic Networks

Experiments using the public goods game have repeatedly shown that in cooperative social environments, punishment makes cooperation flourish, and withholding punishment makes cooperation collapse. In less cooperative social environments, where antisocial punishment has been detected, punishment was detrimental to cooperation. The success of punishment in enhancing cooperation was explained as deterrence of free riders by cooperative strong reciprocators, who were willing to pay the cost of punishing them, whereas in environments in which punishment diminished cooperation, antisocial punishment was explained as revenge by low cooperators against high cooperators suspected of punishing them in previous rounds. The present paper reconsiders the generality of both explanations. Using data from a public goods experiment with punishment, conducted by the authors on Israeli subjects (Study 1), and from a study published in Science using sixteen participant pools from cities around the world (Study 2), we found that: 1. The effect of punishment on the emergence of cooperation was mainly due to contributors increasing their cooperation, rather than from free riders being deterred. 2. Participants adhered to different contribution and punishment strategies. Some cooperated and did not punish (‘cooperators’); others cooperated and punished free riders (‘strong reciprocators’); a third subgroup punished upward and downward relative to their own contribution (‘norm-keepers’); and a small sub-group punished only cooperators (‘antisocial punishers’). 3. Clear societal differences emerged in the mix of the four participant types, with high-contributing pools characterized by higher ratios of ‘strong reciprocators’, and ‘cooperators’, and low-contributing pools characterized by a higher ratio of ‘norm keepers’. 4. The fraction of ‘strong reciprocators’ out of the total punishers emerged as a strong predictor of the groups’ level of cooperation and success in providing the public goods.

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Public goods games on random hyperbolic graphs with mixing

Chaos Solitons & Fractals ◽

10.1016/j.chaos.2021.110720 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 144 ◽

pp. 110720

Author(s):

Maja Duh ◽

Marko Gosak ◽

Matjaž Perc

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Public Goods Games ◽

Hyperbolic Graphs

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Emergence of cooperation with reputation-updating timescale in spatial public goods game

Physics Letters A ◽

10.1016/j.physleta.2021.127173 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 393 ◽

pp. 127173

Author(s):

Weiwei Han ◽

Zhipeng Zhang ◽

Junqing Sun ◽

Chengyi Xia

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Public Goods Game ◽

Emergence Of Cooperation

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Group preferential selection promotes cooperation in spatial public goods game

International Journal of Modern Physics C ◽

10.1142/s0129183114500624 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 25 (11) ◽

pp. 1450062 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Hong-Bin Zhang ◽

Hong Wang

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Role Model ◽

Evolution Of Cooperation ◽

Square Lattice ◽

Public Goods Game ◽

Learning Mechanism ◽

Preferential Selection ◽

Cooperative Evolution ◽

Public Goods Games

We study the evolution of cooperation in public goods games on the square lattice, focusing on the co-player learning mechanism based on the preferential selection that are brought about by wealthy information of groups where participants collect and search for potential imitators from those groups. We find that co-player learning mechanism based on the choice of weighted group can lead to the promotion of public cooperation by means of the information of wealthy groups that is obtained by participants, and after that the partial choice of public goods groups is enhanced with the tunable preferential parameter. Our results highlight that the learning interactions is not solely confined to the restricted connection among players, but co-players of wealthy groups have the opportunity to be as a role model in the promotion of cooperative evolution. Moreover, we also find the size of learning affects the choice of distant players, cooperators (defectors) having more paths to exploit the phalanx of opponents to survive when the value of preferential parameter is small. Besides, the extinction thresholds of cooperators and defectors for different values of noise are also investigated.

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Avoiding or restricting defectors in public goods games?

Journal of The Royal Society Interface ◽

10.1098/rsif.2014.1203 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 12 (103) ◽

pp. 20141203 ◽

Cited By ~ 26

Author(s):

The Anh Han ◽

Luís Moniz Pereira ◽

Tom Lenaerts

Keyword(s):

Experimental Data ◽

Public Goods ◽

Public Good ◽

Common Good ◽

Full Agreement ◽

Group Interactions ◽

The Common Good ◽

Public Goods Games ◽

The Common ◽

Strategic Solution

When creating a public good, strategies or mechanisms are required to handle defectors. We first show mathematically and numerically that prior agreements with posterior compensations provide a strategic solution that leads to substantial levels of cooperation in the context of public goods games, results that are corroborated by available experimental data. Notwithstanding this success, one cannot, as with other approaches, fully exclude the presence of defectors, raising the question of how they can be dealt with to avoid the demise of the common good. We show that both avoiding creation of the common good, whenever full agreement is not reached, and limiting the benefit that disagreeing defectors can acquire, using costly restriction mechanisms, are relevant choices. Nonetheless, restriction mechanisms are found the more favourable, especially in larger group interactions. Given decreasing restriction costs, introducing restraining measures to cope with public goods free-riding issues is the ultimate advantageous solution for all participants, rather than avoiding its creation.

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