Emergence of group cooperation in public goods game on regular small-world network

Abstract

The regular small-world network, which contains the properties of small-world network and regular network, has recently received substantial attention and has been applied in researches on 2-person games. However, it is a common phenomenon that cooperation always appears as a group behavior. In order to investigate the mechanism of group cooperation, we propose an evolutionary multi-person game model on a regular small-world network based on public goods game theory. Then, to make a comparison of frequency of cooperation among different networks, we carry out simulations on three kinds of networks with the same configuration of average degree: the square lattice, regular small-world network and random regular network. The results of simulation show that the group cooperation will emerge among these three networks when the enhancement factor r exceeds a threshold. Furthermore, time required for full cooperation on regular small-world network is slightly longer than the other networks, which indicates that the compact interactions and random interactions will promote cooperation, while the longer-range links are the obstacles in the emergence of cooperation. In addition, the cooperation would be promoted further by enhancing the random interactions on regular small-world network.