Public Goods Game Research Articles

Evolution of psychopathy in the public goods game with institutional redistribution of resources

Intracortical functional connectivity during deep sleep reveals prosocial preferences.

A public goods game model under environmental impact benefits

Tax credit promote cooperation in a punishment-based spatial public goods game

Evolution of fully continuous strategies: Spatial Public Goods Game based on Differential Evolution

Understanding how biological organisms make decisions is of fundamental importance for understanding behaviour. Such an understanding within evolutionary game theory, so far, has been sought by appealing to bounded rationality. Here, we present a perceptual rationality framework in the context of group cooperative interactions, where individuals make rational decisions based on their evolvable perception of the environment. We show that a simple public goods game accounts for power-law distributed perceptual diversity. Incorporating the evolution of social information use into the framework reveals that rational decision-making is a natural root of the evolution of consistent personality differences and power-law distributed behavioural diversity. The behavioural diversity, core to the perceptual rationality approach, can lead to ever-shifting polymorphism or cyclic dynamics, through which different rational personality types coexist and engage in mutualistic, complementary or competitive and exploitative relationships. This polymorphism can lead to non-monotonic evolution as external environmental conditions change. The framework provides predictions consistent with some large-scale eco-evolutionary patterns and illustrates how the evolution of social structure can modify large-scale eco-evolutionary patterns. Furthermore, consistent with most empirical evidence and by contrast to most theoretical predictions, our work suggests diversity is often detrimental to public good provision, especially in strong social dilemmas.

Abstract It is widely recognized that local management of common pool resources can be more efficient and more effective than private markets or top-down government management, especially in remote rural communities in which the institutions may be weak or prone to elite capture. In this paper, we explore the propensity for cooperation in the management of local common resources by introducing a variant of a public goods game among remote rural communities in the state of Odisha, in eastern India. We explore various patterns of cooperation, including free riding behaviour, unconditional cooperation and conditional cooperation, in which individuals’ propensity toward cooperation is tied to their beliefs about the level of cooperation among their peers. We find that a significant portion of our sample fall into this latter category, but also that their expectations about the level of contributions among their peers are somewhat malleable.

The impact of tax-based rewards and mercenary punishment on public goods games

Enhancement of cooperation induced by taxation mechanism with progressive tax rates in spatial public goods games

In the context of interpersonal interactions in human society, reputation serves as an important indicator for evaluating an individual's behavior. Typically, low-reputation individuals are required to face additional constraints before taking certain actions. Moreover, an individual's reputation often exhibits asymmetric dynamics: trust is difficult to build but can be lost instantly. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel spatial public goods game model that integrates historical-behavior-based asymmetric reputation with a deposit mechanism. In this model, the growth or decay of individual reputation is modeled using distinct functions based on the number of consecutive rounds an individual maintains cooperation or defection. Low-reputation individuals are required to pay a deposit into the investment pool before the game; cooperators can reclaim this deposit as a reward, while defectors forfeit it. Simulation results show that the deposit mechanism serves as a powerful driver of cooperation, significantly reducing the critical enhancement factor required for the emergence of cooperation. The reputation threshold plays a crucial role in the evolution of cooperation: moderately increasing the threshold effectively promotes cooperation but exhibits a pronounced diminishing marginal effect. Adjusting the sensitivity of reputation to historical behavior also notably influences group cooperation levels. Furthermore, comprehensive analyses through heatmaps, snapshots, and other graphical data reveal that deposit amounts and reputation thresholds are the two core prerequisites for the emergence of cooperation. Their combined effects ultimately drive the realization of global cooperation.

A novel rule for cooperation in the spatial public goods game: Second-order social learning

Neighbor-aware reinforcement learning fosters cooperation in spatial public goods games

TUC-PPO: Team Utility-Constrained Proximal Policy Optimization for spatial public goods games

PPO-ACT: Proximal policy optimization with adversarial curriculum transfer for spatial public goods games

Effectively addressing societal challenges often requires unrelated individuals to reduce conflict and successfully coordinate actions. The cultural logic of 'honour' is frequently studied in relation to conflict, but its role in competition and cooperation remains underexplored. The current study investigates how perceived normative and personally endorsed honour values predict competition and cooperation behaviours. In an online experiment testing preregistered hypotheses, 3,371 participants from 13 societies made incentivized competition decisions in a contest game and cooperation decisions for coordination in a step-level public goods game. Perceived normative honour values were associated with greater competition and greater cooperation at both societal and individual levels. Personally endorsing values tied to defence of family reputation was associated with greater coordinative efforts, whereas endorsing self-promotion and retaliation was associated with weaker engagement in coordination. These findings highlight the role of honour as a cultural logic (in its different forms) in shaping competition and cooperation across societies.

Emotion helps people hide from traitors and follow partners. It greatly affects the actual migration in a public goods game (PGG). How this factor affect the migration and the corresponding cooperation level has still not been investigated yet. An emotional migration in a PGG on continuous two-dimensional space was investigated. An emotional index was proposed to describe the different attitude of a player to his different neighbors. An emotional migration model was proposed by defining a weight function that a cooperator goes with a neighbor who makes him happier and gets away from a neighbor who makes him angry. Results show that the emotional migration mechanism acts as a double-edged sword, with its effects intricately intertwined with migratory velocity and interaction radius. When both migratory velocity and interaction radius are low, stable emotional communication gradually solidifies the foundation of trust. This process motivates individuals to actively engage in public goods provision, fostering a virtuous cycle of win-win cooperation. Conversely, when migratory velocity surges and the interaction scope expands exponentially, excessive emotional migration disrupts the trust equilibrium, undermines resource allocation order, and renders cooperative strategies unsustainable. Ultimately, this leads to the collapse of the entire cooperative system.

IntroductionRecent research has demonstrated the potential of utilizing mouse-tracking as a viable alternative method for examining attention-related attributes within the context of a multifaceted activity.MethodsIn this study, a mouse-tracking technique was utilized to gather data from individuals who were involved in an online format of the Public Goods Game.ResultsIt was observed that participants exhibited distinct approaches to acquiring information while formulating decisions to propose high, moderate, or low offers. The mouse-tracking algorithm effectively distinguished between various types of offers made toward group funding, as evidenced by the measured distance of the cursor.DiscussionThese findings suggest that mouse-tracking is a valuable tool for capturing decision-making processes and differentiating behavioral patterns in economic game contexts, offering insights into attention and choice mechanisms.

In the post-disaster response phase, emergency shelters face challenges such as resource shortages, uneven distribution and psychological panic among victims. Promoting inter-shelter cooperation is crucial for efficient resource allocation. This study constructs a public goods game based on redistributing emergency resources and develops a redistribution mechanism. We define input coefficient for a shelter, extending the traditional binary strategy space representing the input or non-input resources. In particular, we examine post-disaster panic and leverage the prospect theory to quantify the psychological factors and find selfish participants with an input coefficient of zero. We explore the influence of selection intensity, enhancement factor and government measures on the evolution of cooperative behaviour. Simulation outcomes indicate that the government subsidy exerts a statistically significant positive influence on cooperative behavior within a defined range, outperforming government-imposed punitive measures. In addition, the mechanism undergoes adaptive calibration based on the underlying connectivity patterns observed in random, scale-free and scenario-specific networks.

Type-projection, pro-social behavior, and a public good game

Fairness critically shapes cooperative behavior in social dilemmas, yet the neurocognitive mechanisms linking unfairness experiences to cooperation remain underexplored. Twenty-four participants (Mage = 19.50 years, SD = 1.06) completed the Ultimatum Game (UG) with three proposal types (fair, moderately unfair, and extremely unfair) while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded, followed by the Public Goods Game (PGG) to assess cooperation. Behavioral results revealed that participants exhibited robust inequity aversion, rejecting moderately and extremely unfair UG proposals at significantly higher rates than fair one. Exposure to unfairness reduced subsequent PGG contributions, underscoring fairness as a priority over material gains. ERPs results showed that unfair proposals elicited stronger medial frontal negativity (MFN), reflecting norm violation detection, while fair proposals evoked larger P300 amplitudes, indexing reward valuation. Exploratory analyses revealed that P300 amplitudes positively related to cooperative behavior, suggesting reward-related neural activity facilitates post-inequity cooperation. These findings elucidate behavioral patterns of inequity aversion in interactive games and their neurophysiological correlates, advancing the understanding of how fairness preferences regulate cooperative decision-making.