Abstract
Public good games are a metaphor for modeling cooperative behavior in groups in the presence of incentives to free ride. In the model presented here agents play a public good game with their neighbors in a social network structure. Agents' decision rules in our model are inspired by elementary learning observed in laboratory and online behavioral experiments involving human participants with the same amount of information, i.e., when individuals only know their own current contribution and their own cumulated payoff. In addition, agents in the model are allowed to severe links with groups in which their payoff is lower and create links to a new randomly chosen public goods game. Reinforcing the results obtained in network scenarios where agents play Prisoner's Dilemma games, we show that thanks to this relinking possibility, the whole system reaches higher levels of average contribution with respect to the case in which the network cannot change. Our setup opens new frameworks to be investigated, and potentially confirmed, through controlled human experiments.
Highlights
Public Good Games (PGG) are a well-known model for describing situations that require people or institutions to cooperate to achieve a goal that is considered beneficial to all
In the present study we extend the investigation to dynamic networks for which experimental results are lacking
We first comment on the equilibrium contribution results and we explore the nature of the topological transformations of the initial graphs in the dynamical model
Summary
Public Good Games (PGG) are a well-known model for describing situations that require people or institutions to cooperate to achieve a goal that is considered beneficial to all. In most of the previous cases the numerical simulation models used were of the replicator dynamics type [24] The results of these works do confirm that contributions go to zero in the long term in the average, until a critical value of the enhancement factor is reached. In the present study we extend the models presented in Tomassini and Antonioni [26] in such a way that unsatisfied agents have, in addition, the option of cutting a link with an unfavorable group and of joining another group and we investigate whether this possibility can lead to a higher average contribution This extension is coherent with what we observe in society, where associations can usually be changed, and serve as a simple form of punishment, or retaliation, that does not require complicated strategic considerations. A final section with further discussion and conclusions ends the paper
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