When greediness and self-confidence meet in a social dilemma

TL;DR

This paper explores how biased payoff sharing and self-confidence influence cooperation in public goods games, revealing conflicting effects that depend on the context and validated through analytical and simulation methods.

Contribution

It introduces a model combining biased payoff allocation and strategy confidence, providing analytical insights into their impact on cooperation in spatial public goods games.

Findings

Monopolizing public goods promotes cooperation.

Increased confidence inhibits cooperation.

Conflicting effects lead to heterogeneous cooperation outcomes.

Abstract

A greedy personality is usually accompanied by arrogance and confidence. This work investigates the cooperation success condition in the context of biased payoff allocation and self-confidence. The first component allows the organizer in a spatial public goods game to receive a different proportion of goods than other participants. The second aspect influences the micro-level dynamics of strategy updates, wherein players can maintain their strategy with a certain weight. Analytical results are obtained on square lattices under the weak selection limit. If the organizer attempts to monopolize the public goods, cooperation becomes more attainable. If the confidence increases, cooperation is inhibited. Consequently, these elements have conflicting effects on cooperation, and their simultaneous presence can result in a heterogeneous change of the critical synergy factor. Our theoretical findings underscore the subtle implications of a mutual trait that may manifest as greediness or self-confidence under different circumstances, which are validated through Monte Carlo simulations.