Effects of enhancement level on evolutionary public goods game with payoff aspirations

• Published in: Applied mathematics and computation 2019-06, Vol.350, p.242-248
• Main Authors: Liu, Run-Ran, Jia, Chun-Xiao, Rong, Zhihai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aspiration level; Enhancement level; Evolutionary public goods game
• ISSN: 0096-3003; 1873-5649
• DOI: 10.1016/j.amc.2019.01.009

In this work, we study the spatial evolutionary public goods game by introducing payoff aspirations for players, and players update their strategies with a stochastic probability depending on the difference between their collecting payoffs from neighbors and own payoff aspirations. A striking finding is that the cooperation level is a nonmonotonic function of the enhancement factor for a fixed aspiration level, which means a proper enhancement factor leads to the optimal cooperation level, whereas too high or too low enhancement factors will impede the evolution of cooperation for a particular aspiration level. This phenomenon is contradictory to the previous finding that a larger enhancement factor always leads a higher cooperation level. We explain this anomaly with a comprehensive analysis of the probabilities transitions of C players to D players as well as the reverse. The presented results may be not only helpful in understanding the cooperative behavior induced by the aspiration level in economic or animal society, but also have important implications for the cooperation regulation in system by enhancement factors and payoff aspirations.