Cooperation enhanced by the interaction diversity for the spatial public goods game on regular lattices

Abstract

We investigate the evolution of cooperative behaviors of the spatial public goods game on lattices where the number of interactive neighbors are not identical for all players in the population but they can randomly select the interactive objects from the immediate neighbors in the von Neumann or Moore neighborhood. Extensive numerical simulations indicate that the cooperation level is greatly enhanced by the interaction diversity compared with the traditional model in which the social scope is homogeneous. The mechanism that explains this improvement is based on the inhomogeneous interactive domain in which cooperators can maintain their strategies easily and stabilize the cooperative neighborhood, resulting in the emergence of close cooperation clusters. Moreover, increasing uncertainty in strategy adoption process can resolve the trapped condition with a strong synergy factor and help the system to achieve the full cooperation state when the diversity mechanism is considered.