Issue |
EPL
Volume 111, Number 5, September 2015
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 58004 | |
Number of page(s) | 6 | |
Section | Interdisciplinary Physics and Related Areas of Science and Technology | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/111/58004 | |
Published online | 28 September 2015 |
Altruism in multiplayer snowdrift games with threshold and punishment
Department of Automation, Nankai University - Tianjin 300071, PRC and Tianjin Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics, Nankai University - Tianjin 300071, PRC
Received: 26 June 2015
Accepted: 26 August 2015
The puzzle of cooperation attracts broader concerns of the scientific community nowadays. Here we adopt an extra mechanism of punishment in the framework of a threshold multiple-player snowdrift game employed as the scenario for the cooperation problem. Two scenarios are considered: defectors will suffer punishment regardless of the game results, and defectors will incur punishment only when the game fails. We show by analysis that given this assumption, punishing free riders can significantly influence the evolution outcomes, and the results are driven by the specific components of the punishing rule. Particularly, punishing defectors always, not only when the game fails, can be more effective for maintaining public cooperation in multi-player systems. Intriguingly larger thresholds of the game provide a more favorable scenario for the coexistence of the cooperators and defectors under a broad value range of parameters. Further, cooperators are best supported by the large punishment on defectors, and then dominate and stabilize in the population, under the premise that defectors always incur punishment regardless of whether the game ends successfully or not.
PACS: 87.23.Kg – Dynamics of evolution / 02.50.Le – Decision theory and game theory / 87.23.Ge – Dynamics of social systems
© EPLA, 2015
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