Evolution of global cooperation driven by risks

Abstract

Globalization facilitates our communication with each other, while it magnifies problems such as overharvesting of natural resources and human-induced climate change. Thus people all over the world are involved in a global social dilemma which calls for worldwide cooperation to reduce the risks of these extreme events and disasters. A collective target (threshold) is required to prevent such events. Everyone may lose their wealth once their total individual contributions fail to reach the threshold. To this end, we establish a model of threshold public goods games in a group-structured population and investigate its evolutionary process. We study multilevel public goods games with defectors, local cooperators, and global cooperators and are primarily concerned with how the global cooperative behavior evolves. We find that, compared with the standard public goods games, the strategy of global cooperation accounts for a bigger proportion in the stationary distribution of threshold public goods games. On the other hand, the fixation time of the global cooperation strategy is greatly shortened with increase of the probability of disaster striking. Therefore, global risks induced by the threshold can effectively promote global cooperation in environmental investment and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.