Public Goods Games on Coevolving Social Network Models Articles uri icon

publication date

  • March 2020

volume

  • 8

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 2296-424X

abstract

  • Public good games are a metaphor for modeling cooperative behavior in groups in the presence of incentives to free ride. In the model presented here agents play a public good game with their neighbors in a social
    network structure. Agents' decision rules in our model are inspired by
    elementary learning observed in laboratory and online behavioral experiments
    involving human participants with the same amount of information, i.e., when
    individuals only know their own current contribution and their own cumulated
    payoff. In addition, agents in the model are allowed to severe links with
    groups in which their payoff is lower and create links to a new randomly chosen
    group. Reinforcing the results obtained in network scenarios where agents play
    Prisoner's Dilemma games, we show that thanks to this relinking possibility,
    the whole system reaches higher levels of average contribution with respect to
    the case in which the network cannot change. Our setup opens new frameworks to
    be investigated, and potentially confirmed, through controlled human
    experiments.

keywords

  • cooperation; dynamic networks; pgg; simulation model; social networks