Evolution of cooperation in the regional environmental governance with institutional reward

Abstract

The public goods game is extended with the assumption that increasing participation leads to increasing reward to promote cooperation in the regional environmental governance. This model constitutes a generalisation of the N-person prisoners' dilemma, and we study the infinite population case. The replicator dynamics reveals the existence of regimes in which two internal fixed points appear simultaneously, which is similar with that of N-person stag hunt evolutionary game. It is shown that the one at the lower frequency of cooperators is unstable, determining the threshold for cooperative collective action, while the one at the higher frequency is stable, determining the final frequency of cooperators in the population. Moreover, larger scale groups make the cooperation more difficult.