Cooperation and Contribution on a framework of Public Goods Game (PGG)

Introduction

Essentially, the typical public goods game (PGG) consists in a model of public spending for a community (e.g. roads, pools, bridges), where players could invest their money in the good and the profit would be the surplus redistributed equally for all individuals (Silva, 2007). Many public goods games have been used to investigate features like bargaining, cooperation, competition, altruism, fairness and selfishness, for example (Szabo and Fath, 2007).

The evolutionary game theory has become a reliable approach to study the development of cooperation in many social dilemma situations (Novak, 2006; Szabo and Fath, 2007). The classical paradigms include the prisoners’ dilemma game and the snowdrift game. In the PGG framework, for example, it is proposed a multi-person prisoners’ dilemma game managed by group of interactions (Binmore, 1994). The public goods game and other evolutionary game models has been applied for all types of structure population like lattices, small-world network, scale-free networks, dynamic networks and interdependent networks (Yang and Rong, 2015).

Objective

In public goods games, individual’s motivation may promote pro-social behavior (Silva, 2007), social influences promote cooperative behavior (Wu et. al., 2014), selfishness promotes noncooperation resulting in the “tragedy of the commons” (Song et.al., 2011), punishment can increase cooperation when players may coincide their strategy with the others (Asch, 1952) and endowments may be affected by a scenario of inequality. All these factors are going to be discussed in this synthesis. The study presents a model of analysis for each one described in different sections, showing the main results regarding the effects on cooperation and contribution and under which circumstances they hold.

Section I – Can the Pro-Social Behavior Persist?

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The pro-social behavior is a behavior that intends to benefit others in the society, altruistic actions that favors a good distribution of the benefits among groups. The general situation is a condition where there is a profit obtained by the players’ contribution (optional) and each player is unaware of the other players’ contribution. In order to encourage the donations, the amount will be more than the necessary for the public good and at the end it will be redistributed among the players (independently on the given contribution) (Silva, 2007).

This study proposes a new approach to investigate pro-social behavior in an artificial society of players through public good game using Monte Carlo simulation. The author’s model is a return function where pro-social is described as a binary variable for motivation, which drives the players to invest in the public goods by updating the benefits achieved by each player. The analysis also includes noise effects on the density of motivation and consider the motivation chosen according to the return of the neighbors (Silva, 2007).