The impact of current and historical reputation with non-uniform change on cooperation in spatial public goods game

Abstract

In the complex human social environment, reputation plays an important role in interpersonal communication. Normally, individuals pay attention to their neighbors’ current and historical reputations during strategy learning, and the variation of individual reputation over time is often non-uniform. This paper proposes a new spatial public goods game model that involves current and historical reputation. An exponential function of the rounds in which the individual continuously maintains the cooperative or defective strategy unchanged is defined to reflect the change of the individual reputation. And two discount coefficients involving five parameters are introduced to the imitation probability of strategy learning. Simulation results indicate that high sensitivities of individuals to her/his own reputation, to the reputation of her/his neighbors, and to changes in neighbors’ historical reputations are all beneficial for the cooperative behavior of the system. And individual behavior of paying attention to changes in neighbors’ historical reputation is also beneficial for the cooperation, but attention to more historical reputation changes in neighbors does not further promote cooperative behavior. The sensitivity of the population to individual historical information about strategy has little impact on the cooperative behavior of the system.