Evolution of cooperation driven by individual disguise in the public goods game with pool punishment

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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Cooperation and competition between pair and multi-player social games in spatial populations

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-91532-5 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Attila Szolnoki ◽

Xiaojie Chen

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Evolutionary Game Theory ◽

Evolutionary Game ◽

Pair Interaction ◽

Public Goods Game ◽

Point Interactions ◽

Social Games ◽

The Public ◽

Specific Parameter ◽

Group Members

AbstractThe conflict between individual and collective interests is in the heart of every social dilemmas established by evolutionary game theory. We cannot avoid these conflicts but sometimes we may choose which interaction framework to use as a battlefield. For instance some people like to be part of a larger group while other persons prefer to interact in a more personalized, individual way. Both attitudes can be formulated via appropriately chosen traditional games. In particular, the prisoner’s dilemma game is based on pair interaction while the public goods game represents multi-point interactions of group members. To reveal the possible advantage of a certain attitude we extend these models by allowing players not simply to change their strategies but also let them to vary their attitudes for a higher individual income. We show that both attitudes could be the winner at a specific parameter value. Interestingly, however, the subtle interplay between different states may result in a counterintuitive evolutionary outcome where the increase of the multiplication factor of public goods game drives the population to a fully defector state. We point out that the accompanying pattern formation can only be understood via the multipoint or multi-player interactions of different microscopic states where the vicinity of a particular state may influence the relation of two other competitors.

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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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