Small Fraction of Selective Cooperators Can Elevate General Wellbeing Significantly

TL;DR

This paper shows that a small fraction of selectively cooperative players can significantly boost overall cooperation and wellbeing in public goods games, even under challenging conditions.

Contribution

It introduces and tests a selective investment protocol where cooperative players focus on the most successful neighbors, demonstrating its effectiveness even with few supporting players.

Findings

Selective cooperation can achieve high overall cooperation levels.

A small fraction of supportive players can influence the entire population.

Percolation of supportive influence enhances cooperation at lower dilemma strength.

Abstract

A cooperative player invests effort into a common venture without knowing the partner's intention in advance. But this strategy can be implemented in various ways when a player is involved in different games simultaneously. Interestingly, if cooperative players distinguish their neighbors and allocate all their external investments into the most successful partner's game exclusively then a significant cooperation level can be reached even at harsh circumstances where game parameters would dictate full defection otherwise. This positive impact, however, can also be reached when just a smaller fraction of players apply this sophisticated investment protocol during the game. To confirm this hypothesis we have checked several distributions that determine the fraction of supporting players who apply the mentioned selective investment protocol. Notably, when these players are not isolated, but their influences percolate then the whole population may enjoy the benefit of full cooperation already at a relatively low value of the synergy factor which represents the dilemma strength in the applied public goods game.