Adaptive play stabilizes cooperation in continuous 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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