Abstract
The phenomenon of asset heterogeneity is widespread in human society. However, it is unclear what roles heterogeneous assets play in the evolution of cooperation of the collective-risk society. In this paper, we thus introduce asset heterogeneity into a threshold public goods game with collective-risk, and we divide the population into the rich and the poor according to individual assets. We show that asset heterogeneity hinders public cooperation no matter whether the temptation to defect is high or low. We find that cooperation collapses in the conditions of low risk, the high gap between the rich and the poor, and high threshold. Besides, the increment of individual assets can significantly enhance the level of public cooperation even the conditions for the evolution of cooperation are strongly harsh. Our work is instructive to a better understanding of the emergence of cooperation in the risky society with heterogeneous assets.
Highlights
The emergence and maintenance of cooperative behavior is fundamental for a society to thrive [1–17]
We have introduced asset heterogeneity in the collective-risk social dilemma game, and intensively studied its effects on the evolution of public cooperation
We have been motivated by the fact that an uneven distribution of personal assets is surprisingly common in human societies, as well as by the fact that recent research on a similar variant of the collectiverisk social dilemma game in a well-mixed population has shown that heterogeneous wealth distributions can affect public cooperation [70]
Summary
The emergence and maintenance of cooperative behavior is fundamental for a society to thrive [1–17]. Several mechanisms have been proposed in the past decades for supporting the emergence of public cooperation [45–65] These mentioned works assumed that all individuals have been treated as equivalent in all respects, in sharp contrast with real-life situations, in which diversity is ubiquitous. Our modern societies are grounded in great diversity, in which some individuals play radically different roles depending on their social positions [66–79]. Until recently, such heterogeneity has attracted considerable attention. Some other researches assumed that players may participant in PGG with different wealth distributions [70, 81, 82]. We introduce asset heterogeneity in a threshold public goods game (TPGG) with collective risk to investigate how cooperation evolves. We verify how social cooperation depends on other important parameters, such as risk, threshold, and the proportion of the poor
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
