The evolution of cooperation in the public goods game on the scale-free community networks under multiple strategy updating rules

TL;DR

This paper explores how cooperation evolves in scale-free community networks during public goods games, highlighting the influence of different strategy updating rules and network structures on cooperative behavior.

Contribution

It introduces the analysis of multiple strategy updating rules in scale-free community networks, revealing their impact on cooperation dynamics and the importance of community structure.

Findings

Community structure promotes cooperation.

A 'U' shape relationship exists between cooperation and rule proportions.

Pairwise comparison rules are more influential than aspiration-driven rules.

Abstract

Social networks have a scale-free property and community structure, and many problems in life have the characteristic of public goods, such as resource shortage. Due to different preferences of individuals, there exist individuals who adopt heterogeneous strategies updating rules in the network. We investigate the evolution of cooperation in the scale-free community network with public goods games and the influence of multiple strategy updating rules. Here, two types of strategy updating rules are considered which are pairwise comparison rules and aspiration-driven rules. Numerical simulations are conducted and presented corresponding results. We find that community structure promotes the emergence of cooperation in public goods games. In the meantime, there is a "U" shape relationship between the frequency of cooperators and the proportion of the two strategy updating rules. With the variance in the proportion of the two strategy updating rules, pairwise comparison rules seem to be more sensitive. Compared with aspiration-driven rules, pairwise comparison rules play a more important role in promoting cooperation. Our work may be helpful to understand the evolution of cooperation in social networks.