Impact of critical mass on the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games

Abstract

We study the evolution of cooperation under the assumption that the collective benefits of group membership can only be harvested if the fraction of cooperators within the group, i.e. their critical mass, exceeds a threshold value. Considering structured populations, we show that a moderate fraction of cooperators can prevail even at very low multiplication factors if the critical mass is minimal. For larger multiplication factors, however, the level of cooperation is highest at an intermediate value of the critical mass. The latter is robust to variations of the group size and the interaction network topology. Applying the optimal critical mass threshold, we show that the fraction of cooperators in public goods games is significantly larger than in the traditional linear model, where the produced public good is proportional to the fraction of cooperators within the group.

arXiv comment4 two-column pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in Physical Review E

References in corpus (11)

• Evolutionary games on graphs
• Coevolutionary games - a mini review
• Evolutionary game theory: Temporal and spatial effects beyond replicator dynamics
• Phase transitions and volunteering in spatial public goods games
• The outbreak of cooperation among success-driven individuals under noisy conditions
• Topology independent impact of noise on cooperation in spatial public goods games
• Complex cooperative networks from evolutionary preferential attachment
• Effects of inhomogeneous activity of players and noise on cooperation in spatial public goods games
• Partner selections in public goods games with constant group size
• Nonequilibrium phase transition due to social group isolation
• Reducing the Heterogeneity of Payoffs: an Effective Way to Promote Cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma Game

Cited by in corpus (25)

• Statistical physics of human cooperation
• Evolutionary dynamics of group interactions on structured populations: A review
• Geographic constraints on social network groups
• Conditional strategies and the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games
• Risk-driven migration and the collective-risk social dilemma
• Benefits of tolerance in public goods games
• Impact of generalized benefit functions on the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games with continuous strategies
• Group size effect on cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas II. Curvilinear effect
• Adaptive and bounded investment returns promote cooperation in spatial public goods games
• Reciprocity-based cooperative phalanx maintained by overconfident players
• Cooperation percolation in spatial prisoner's dilemma game
• Evolution of cooperation in spatial traveler's dilemma game
• Evolutionary dynamics in state-feedback public goods games with peer punishment
• Group-size dependent synergy in heterogeneous populations
• Promotion of Cooperation by Selective Group Extinction
• Cooperation in public goods games: stay, but not for too long
• Local interaction scale controls the existence of a non-trivial optimal critical mass in opinion spreading
• Status maximization as a source of fairness in a networked dictator game
• Multiple learning mechanisms promote cooperation in public goods games with project selection
• Evolutionary dynamics of continuous public goods games in structured populations
• A generalized public goods game with coupling of individual ability and project benefit
• Entropy-Norm space for geometric selection of strict Nash equilibria in n-person games
• Effect of depreciation of the public goods in spatial public goods games
• Evolutionary dynamics in public goods games with general frequency-dependent returns
• The world of strategies with memory