Effects of income redistribution on the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games

Abstract

Income redistribution is the transfer of income from some individuals to others directly or indirectly by means of social mechanisms, such as taxation, public services and so on. Employing a spatial public goods game, we study the influence of income redistribution on the evolution of cooperation. Two kinds of evolutionary models are constructed, which describe local and global redistribution of income respectively. In the local model, players have to pay part of their income after each PGG and the accumulated income is redistributed to the members. While in the global model, all the players pay part of their income after engaging in all the local PGGs, which are centred on himself and his nearest neighbours, and the accumulated income is redistributed to the whole population. We show that the cooperation prospers significantly with increasing income expenditure proportion in the local redistribution of income, while in the global model the situation is opposite. Furthermore, the cooperation drops dramatically from the maximum curvature point of income expenditure proportion. In particular, the intermediate critical points are closely related to the renormalized enhancement factors.

Small Fraction of Selective Cooperators Can Elevate General Wellbeing Significantly

“…Importantly, we assume a regular interaction network because irregular graph would already ensure an obvious benefit for those nodes who have higher degree, hence larger personal income is expected to them [41,47]. Since the presence of heterogeneity is a broadly recognized cooperator supporting condition [48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56] therefore we want to avoid this effect and focus on the proposed investment protocol only.…”

Alliance formation with exclusion in the spatial public goods game

“…We should stress, however, that our most important observations are robust and remain valid if we apply other interaction topologies as will be illustrated in the next section. The only essential criterion is to have a limited number of neighbors who are fixed, at least, for a reasonable time of interaction comparing to the strategy update time scale [35][36][37][38].…”

A Proportional-Egalitarian Allocation Policy for Public Goods Problems with Complex Network

“…On the other hand, if a player has a good reputation for his or her altruistic behaviors or positive contributions to the class of repeated public goods games, the other players will be more willing to cooperate with this player [28][29][30]. Additionally, in order to avoid public tragedy, some special factors of the allocation policy are also playing important roles in dynamic evolution games, such as enhancement factors (or profit margins), distribution ratios of the incomes, logical factors to distinguish who will participate in the second-order payment, and so on [31][32][33]. According to some concrete simulations, appropriate values of special factors could be fixed to promote the cooperative evolution.…”

“…This research is motivated by [32,33], which studied the impact of income redistribution on cooperative evolution to deal with public goods games underlying a regular lattice network. Different from their works, this paper studies the public goods problems in an asymmetric social phenomenon and proposes a two-step allocation method to divide the total income.…”