Self-adjusting rule in spatial voluntary public goods games

¹  School of Science, Tianjin University of Technology - Tianjin 300384, China
²  Department of Physics, Nankai University - Tianjin, China 300071
³  School of Management, Tianjin University of Technology - Tianjin 300384, China

Corresponding author: zhanglz@nankai.edu.cn

Received: 19 December 2009
Accepted: 3 April 2010

Abstract

The emergence and abundance of cooperation in animal and human societies is a challenging puzzle to evolutionary biology. Most research has focused on the imitation rules, but the update rules based uniquely on one's own payoff have received less attention so far. In this letter, we introduce a new yet simple update rule into a spatial voluntary public goods game where the agents located on a square lattice have longer memory and choose the successful strategies according to the game's earlier history. This introduction results in interesting dynamical properties and intriguing spatiotemporal patterns. In particular, this introduction can provide an explanation how microscopic agent-agent interactions may generate a spontaneous aggregate cooperation towards a more efficient outcome in the real-life situations. In addition, we found that the length of memory has a crucial effect on the average outcome of the population by this introduction.