Blocking defector invasion by focusing on the most successful partner

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that allowing cooperators to support only their most successful neighbors in spatial public goods games significantly promotes cooperation, even under challenging conditions, through a biasing blocking mechanism.

Contribution

It introduces a novel strategy where cooperators focus support on the most successful neighbor, enhancing cooperation in spatial public goods games.

Findings

Cooperators prevail in harsh environments with low synergy factors.

Focusing support on successful neighbors creates a blocking mechanism that favors cooperation.

Results are consistent across different interaction topologies.

Abstract

According to the standard protocol of spatial public goods game, a cooperator player invests not only into his own game but also into the games organized by neighboring partners. In this work, we relax this assumption by allowing cooperators to decide which neighboring group to prefer instead of supporting them uniformly. In particular, we assume that they select their most successful neighbor and focus external investments exclusively into the related group. We show that this very simple alteration of the dynamical rule results in a surprisingly positive evolutionary outcome -- cooperators prevail even in harsh environment represented by small values of the synergy factor in the game. The microscopic mechanism behind the reported success of the cooperator strategy can be explained by a blocking mechanism which affects the propagations of competing strategies in a biased way. Our results, which remain intact by using different interaction topologies, reveal that it could be beneficial to concentrate individual efforts to reach a higher global wellbeing.