The evolution of cooperation with preferential selection in voluntary public goods game

Abstract

Public goods game with voluntary participating has been well studied to illustrate the evolution of cooperation. Based on the voluntary public good game, the main idea of this paper is to consider preference selection under myopic updating rule in evolution process. In detail, when the strategy of the focal player is different from the neighbor which is chosen via preference selection, it will take neighbor’s strategy as reference to imitate. Then, focal player assumes him to use the reference strategy, after that the player decides whether to update the strategy by comparing the payoff before and after the strategy change. We control the player’s preference through parameters and study the influence of different choice preferences on cooperative behavior. The results show that with the increase of preference parameters, more and more players participate in the public goods game, giving survival opportunity of cooperation and defection. That is to say, when players prefer to choose the neighbor with higher income as the reference object, it is beneficial for the maintenance of cooperation. Therefore, players’ enthusiasm to participate in the game can be improved by encouraging players to pay attention to personal benefits in voluntary public goods game, which is helpful to maintain the emergence of cooperative behavior in spatial network.