Late movers refer to individuals who adjust their strategies after observing the choices of others in a public goods game, can significantly impact the likelihood of public goods provision. This ...creates a social dilemma: late movers act as free-riders to rely on others to contribute, yet they also risk the public good not being provided if contributions fall short. To address this dilemma, we utilize a spatial threshold public goods game model to examine how the behaviors of late movers influence overall cooperative levels within a population. We propose a probabilistic rule for late movers that captures the dilemma between cooperating to enhance the collective good and free-riding to maximize individual benefits. Our findings indicate that strategic late movers can significantly enhance cooperation by adapting to local cooperation levels. However, an excessively high proportion of late movers may reduce the overall level of cooperation. Additionally, the formation of clusters by late movers results in higher cooperative levels compared to random distribution. Our study provides novel insights into the dynamics of cooperation within the framework of spatial threshold public goods games. By incorporating the role of late movers, we highlight how adaptive strategies can mitigate the free-rider problem and promote cooperative behaviors.
•Probabilistic rule elucidates social dilemma in spatial threshold public goods games.•Strategic late movers enhance cooperation by adapting to local cooperation levels.•High proportion of late movers may reduce overall cooperation.•Clustering of late movers results in higher cooperation than random distribution.
As a social welfare, pension insurance has provided a great assistance to retiree in maintaining their livelihoods. In order to reward the contributions made by cooperators, an additional pension ...income is provided to them. In this paper, we study a public goods game based on the pension system on population structure, in which only cooperators can purchase pension insurance and receive pension benefits upon meeting specified conditions. In the simulation, we demonstrate the evolution of cooperation frequency over time and investigate the influence of insurance premium, pension baseline, the number of defected neighbors of cooperators, and the enhancement factor on the cooperation frequency. Additionally, we examine the impact of the pension system on cooperative behavior in triangular and hexagonal networks. Our results suggest that in the public goods game on networked structure, the pension system not only fails to promote cooperation but actually inhibits it, even when cooperators do not have to pay any costs and can receive pensions when conditions are met.
•A new mechanism of punishment is proposed in the spatial public goods game.•Individuals with the majority strategy will punish those with the minority strategy.•The results show that cooperation is ...greatly enhanced by punishing minority.•Both of the first and the second phase transitions are found in our model.
Punishment is an effective way to sustain cooperation among selfish individuals. In most of previous studies, objects of punishment are set to be defectors. In this paper, we propose a mechanism of punishment, in which individuals with the majority strategy will punish those with the minority strategy in a public goods game group. Both theoretical analysis and simulation show that the cooperation level can be greatly enhanced by punishing minority. For no punishment or small values of punishment fine, the fraction of cooperators continuously increases with the multiplication factor. However, for large values of punishment fine, there exists a critical value of multiplication factor, at which the fraction of cooperators suddenly jumps from 0 to 1. The density of different types of groups is also studied.
In this paper, we study the effects of reputation-based investment strategy on cooperation in the spatial public goods games. The investment of one player to a particular group depends on the ...reputation of the group organizer. We define a player’s reputation as the frequency of cooperation in the past few time steps. Our results show that the cooperation level can be remarkably enhanced if a player invests more in the group organized by a higher-reputation leader. We explain this phenomenon by analyzing the income gap between cooperators and defectors at the interface that separates clusters of the two competing strategies. To have an intuitive understanding, we plot the snapshots of spatial distributions of players with different reputation. The effects of the memory length are also studied.
•We propose a reputation-based investment strategy in the public goods game.•The investment to a group depends on the reputation of the group organizer.•A player’s reputation is the frequency of cooperation in the past few time steps.
•In structured populations, we proposed a model with special players that punish defectors.•Such a policelike or mercenary punishment can be maintained by a tax-based fund.•If this tax is negligible, ...a cyclic dominance may emerge among different strategies.•When this tax is significant then this cyclic dominance solution disappears.•The maximal average outcome can be reached at an intermediate cost value of punishment.
Punishing those who refuse to participate in common efforts is a known and intensively studied way to maintain cooperation among self-interested agents. But this act is costly, hence punishers who are generally also engaged in the original joint venture, become vulnerable, which jeopardizes the effectiveness of this incentive. As an alternative, we may hire special players, whose only duty is to watch the population and punish defectors. Such a policelike or mercenary punishment can be maintained by a tax-based fund. If this tax is negligible, a cyclic dominance may emerge among different strategies. When this tax is relevant then this solution disappears. In the latter case, the fine level becomes a significant factor that determines whether punisher players coexist with cooperators or alternatively with defectors. The maximal average outcome can be reached at an intermediate cost value of punishment. Our observations highlight that we should take special care when such kind of punishment and accompanying tax are introduced to reach a collective goal.
Abuse of power Hoeft, Leonard; Mill, Wladislaw
Journal of economic behavior & organization,
April 2024, 2024-04-00, Letnik:
220
Journal Article
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Punishment institutions are a major guarantor of prosocial behavior. At the same time, their asymmetrical power structure may lead to antisocial behavior itself. We investigate power abuse, ...understood as the use of power for personal gain, of a single punisher in a public-goods game subject to variations in punishment power and contribution transparency. Using a laboratory experiment we find a high amount of abuse across all conditions. More power led to more abuse over time, while transparency could only curb abuse in the high power conditions. These findings highlight the dangers of power centralization but suggest a more complex relation of power and transparency.
In this work, we study the spatial evolutionary public goods game by introducing payoff aspirations for players, and players update their strategies with a stochastic probability depending on the ...difference between their collecting payoffs from neighbors and own payoff aspirations. A striking finding is that the cooperation level is a nonmonotonic function of the enhancement factor for a fixed aspiration level, which means a proper enhancement factor leads to the optimal cooperation level, whereas too high or too low enhancement factors will impede the evolution of cooperation for a particular aspiration level. This phenomenon is contradictory to the previous finding that a larger enhancement factor always leads a higher cooperation level. We explain this anomaly with a comprehensive analysis of the probabilities transitions of C players to D players as well as the reverse. The presented results may be not only helpful in understanding the cooperative behavior induced by the aspiration level in economic or animal society, but also have important implications for the cooperation regulation in system by enhancement factors and payoff aspirations.
•A spatial PGG model on interdependent networks is proposed.•The reputation value is commonly determined by two corresponding partners.•Three different reputation governing rules are proposed.•The ...introduction of reputation greatly promotes the evolution of cooperation.•The higher the reputation referring probability, the higher the cooperation level.
In this paper, we mainly probe into the evolution of cooperation in the spatial public goods game on interdependent lattices by introducing the reputation inferring mechanism into the strategy selection. During the strategy update, the individual reputation is commonly determined by two corresponding partners on interdependent lattices, where the imitated neighbors are chosen in accordance with the average, maximum and minimum of reputation values between two partners within the neighborhood of a focal player. A large plethora of simulations indicate that three reputation computing rules all lead to the promotion of cooperation when compared to the traditional public goods game model. Among them, the promotion of cooperation under the average and minimum schemes are relatively better than that produced by the maximum rule. The detailed cluster formation and reputation distribution are provided to illustrate the slight difference between the outcomes under these three decision making criterions, in which the choice of learning objects is governed by their reputations. Thus, we can conclude that current results are further conducive to understanding the universal and persuasive cooperation within many natural, biological, social and even man-made systems.
•Tax-based pure punishment has an evolutionary advantage over pure punishment in sustaining cooperation.•Tax-based pure reward has an evolutionary advantage over pure reward in sustaining ...cooperation.•Tax-based pure reward can lead to higher levels of cooperation when it is compared with tax-based pure punishment.
Costly punishment and reward have been regarded as potential means to handle the conundrum of cooperation. However, providing incentives is costly, thus the emergence of costly punishment and reward is a major puzzle in the evolution of cooperation. Recently, it is found that pure punishers, who do not help others but punish free-riders, have an evolutionary advantage. In this work, based on the pure punishment strategy, we further propose tax-based pure punishment and reward strategies in the public goods game respectively by considering that in realistic world the dedicated sanctioning or rewarding agencies can receive a certain amount of revenue tax to penalize evildoers or reward good men. By means of theoretical analysis and numerical calculations, we find that tax-based pure punishment (reward) has an evolutionary advantage over pure punishment (reward) in sustaining cooperation, and tax-based pure reward can lead to higher level of cooperation than tax-based pure punishment.
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