Phase transitions and volunteering in spatial public goods games.

By György Szabó, C. Hauert. Physical Review Letters, 2002

580 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a simple yet effective mechanism promoting cooperation under full anonymity by allowing for voluntary participation in public goods games. This natural extension leads to "rock-scissors-paper"-type cyclic dominance of the three strategies, cooperate, defect, and loner. In spatial settings with players arranged on a regular lattice, this results in interesting dynamical properties and intriguing spatiotemporal patterns. In particular, variations of the value of the public good leads to transitions between one-, two-, and three-strategy states which either are in the class of directed percolation or show interesting analogies to Ising-type models. Although volunteering is incapable of stabilizing cooperation, it efficiently prevents successful spreading of selfish behavior.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f23507c7f254e3f7df55026d307386b28180f59a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Models of cooperation based on the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Snowdrift game (2005, background): “…1999; Hauert 2001), and Schweitzer et al. (2002) recently gave a classification of the dynamic regimes in the spatial PD. Interesting phase transitions can occur between the 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/CNRS different dynamic regimes of spatial games (Szabó & Tõke 1998; Szabó & Hauert 2002).”
Fixation times in evolutionary games under weak selection (2008, background): “Recently, the application of methods from statistical physics to these systems has lead to many important insights [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].”
Cyclic dominance in evolutionary games: a review (2014, background): “In the light of the reviewed results on the spatial RPS game, it is perhaps little surprising that structured populations also maintain the survival of all three competing strategies, but they do so not through the emergence of oscillations, but rather through time-wise constant fractions of coopera”
Evolutionary Establishment of Moral and Double Moral Standards through Spatial Interactions (2010, unknown): “For well-mixed interactions, defectors are the winners of the evolutionary competition among the four behavioral strategies C, D, M, and I [36], which implies a tragedy of the commons despite punishment eﬀorts.”