Effects of inhomogeneous activity of players and noise on cooperation in spatial public goods games

TL;DR

This study examines how inhomogeneous activity and noise influence cooperation in spatial public goods games, revealing complex effects of noise on cooperative behavior depending on system parameters and update rules.

Contribution

It introduces inhomogeneous activity of players into noisy spatial public goods games and analyzes its impact on cooperation, highlighting the nontrivial role of noise.

Findings

Inhomogeneous activity promotes cooperation.

Noise effects on cooperation depend on parameters.

Cooperator density varies non-monotonically with noise.

Abstract

We study the public goods game in the noisy case by considering the players with inhomogeneous activity teaching on a square lattice. It is shown that the introduction of the inhomogeneous activity of teaching of the players can remarkably promote cooperation. By investigating the effects of noise on cooperative behavior in detail, we find that the variation of cooperator density $\rho_C$ with the noise parameter $\kappa$ displays several different behaviors: $\rho_C$ monotonically increases (decreases) with $\kappa$; $\rho_C$ firstly increases (decreases) with $\kappa$ and then it decreases (increases) monotonically after reaching its maximum (minimum) value, which depends on the amount of the multiplication factor $r$, on whether the system is homogeneous or inhomogeneous, and on whether the adopted updating is synchronous or asynchronous. These results imply that the noise plays an important and nontrivial role in the evolution of cooperation.