Heterogeneous resource allocation can change social hierarchy in public goods games

Abstract

Public goods games (PGGs) represent one of the most useful tools to study group interactions. However, even if they could provide an explanation for the emergence and stability of cooperation in modern societies, they are not able to reproduce some key features observed in social and economical interactions. The typical shape of wealth distribution—known as Pareto Law—and the microscopic organization of wealth production are two of them. Here, we introduce a modification to the classical formulation of PGGs that allows for the emergence of both of these features from first principles. Unlike traditional PGGs, where players contribute equally to all the games in which they participate, we allow individuals to redistribute their contribution according to what they earned in previous rounds. Results from numerical simulations show that not only a Pareto distribution for the pay-offs naturally emerges but also that if players do not invest enough in one round they can act as defectors even if they are formally cooperators. Our results not only give an explanation for wealth heterogeneity observed in real data but also point to a conceptual change on cooperation in collective dilemmas.

Understanding spatial public goods games on three-layer networks

“…This shows that in the most frequently studied spatial PGGs, individuals' behavior in self-centered game and in neighbor-centered games do not have the same effect on social cooperation. Although benefits are allocated to all participants equally, increasing the investment in the self-centered game can confer cooperation more advantages, an effect never observed in prior studies [29,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. Figure 4 shows an example that makes this explicit.…”

“…These clouds strengthen the viability of the hub cooperators and increase survival of cooperation, even under testing conditions. In particular, most prior studies exploring nonuniform investment or payoff allocation [29,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45] incorporate heterogeneity in individuals' attributes. For example, when each individual is assigned a random scaling factor to indicate benefit allocation, the scaling factor difference causes individuals' heterogeneity, which is partly responsible for the persistence of cooperation [41].…”

“…A tacit assumption in spatial multiplayer games is that each individual engages in a self-centered and all neighbor-centered games in each generation [29,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45]. Few studies have examined how the same behavior in the self-centered game and neighbor-centered games affect the evolution of cooperation differently.…”

“…All these imply nonuniform investment and payoff allocation. Despite the results obtained by a few numerical simulation studies [29,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45], many fundamental questions still remain unanswered. Prior studies always couple various factors (besides nonuniform investment and payoff allocation) into a model, which usually obscures how the heterogeneity in investment or payoff allocation affects the evolutionary outcomes [39,41].…”

Leaving bads provides better outcome than approaching goods in a social dilemma

“…Individual migration is an essential characteristic of living organisms [22]. It has been demonstrated that the mode of individual mobility does influence the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation among unrelated individuals, which has attracted intensive research activity in recent years [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. Theoretical and experimental studies have shown that individual mobility can promote the evolution of cooperation [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59].…”