Strategy intervention in spatial voluntary public goods games

¹ School of Physics, Nankai University - Tianjin 300071, China
² School of Science, Tianjin University of Technology - Tianjin 300384, China
³ Institute of Crustal Dynamics, China Earthquake Administration, Ministry of Emergency Management Beijing 100085, China

^(a) xuzhaojin1234@126.com (corresponding author)
^(b) Zhanglz@nankai.edu.cn (corresponding author)

Received: 2 February 2018
Accepted: 4 May 2018

Abstract

It is well known that punishment has been considered to enhance cooperation based on empirical and theoretical studies. An important question arises over the existence of the “second-order” problems, which result from the interactions between individuals. In this paper, we propose strategy intervention as a new mechanism in spatial voluntary public goods game, in which individuals only know their own payoffs. By virtue of centralized institution, the defectors may reserve amounts of probabilities to contribute to the common pool with a certain amount of investments. The centralized institution is established costly by all the participants to enforce the intervention rather than peer punishment. We find that the number of cooperators (defectors) decreases (increases) with weak intervention, which contrasts our intuition. Loners vanish and cooperation emerges significantly, as the level of intervention reaches a threshold. We give an accurate range of intervention leading to full cooperation, and demonstrate that at partial cooperation state, proper intervention can remarkably increase income accumulations of individuals, between which there exists smaller income gap in contrast to typical models. We highlight the significance of intervention enforced by a higher authority for maintaining social stability.