Evolution of cooperation in the spatial public goods game with adaptive reputation assortment

Abstract

We present a new spatial public goods game model, which takes the individual reputation and behavior diversity into account at the same time, to investigate the evolution of cooperation. Initially, each player x will be endowed with an integer Rx between 1 and Rmax to characterize his reputation value, which will be adaptively varied according to the strategy action at each time step. Then, the agents play the game and the system proceeds in accordance with a Fermi-like rule, in which a multiplicative factor (wy) to denote the individual difference to perform the strategy transfer will be placed before the traditional Fermi probability. For influential participants, wy is set to be 1.0, but be a smaller value w (0<w<1) for non-influential ones. Large quantities of simulations demonstrate that the cooperation behavior will be obviously influenced by the reputation threshold (RC), and the greater the threshold, the higher the fraction of cooperators. The origin of promotion of cooperation will be attributed to the fact that the larger reputation threshold renders the higher heterogeneity in the fraction of two types of players and strategy spreading capability. Our work is conducive to a better understanding of the emergence of cooperation within many real-world systems.