Eur. Phys. J. B (2018) 91: 112
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2018-90042-8

Regular Article

The effect of heterogeneous defectors on the evolution of public cooperation

¹ College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, P.R. China
² School of Economics and Management, Chang’an University, Xi’an 710064, P.R. China

^a e-mail: 2016209235@tju.edu.cn

Received: 24 January 2018
Received in final form: 24 March 2018
Published online: 13 June 2018

Abstract

In recent years,more and more private capital join the construction of cultural facilities and the organization of cultural activities in China. Actually, the organization of cultural activities by crowd-funding mechanism is a kind of multi-player game. Not all players who donate different amount of money are real cooperators. In fact, some cunning defectors may donate a little money to avoid the gossip and punishment. This part of people are very tricky. They could be seen as heterogeneous defectors. The role of heterogeneous defectors is investigated in cooperative behaviors of complex social network. Numerical results show that heterogeneous defectors could be a buffer for maintaining the public pool when synergy factor is low in public goods game (PGG). It is relatively easy to be cooperators for heterogeneous defectors when synergy factor is high in PGG. To better improve cooperation, punishment towards heterogeneous defectors and complete defectors is introduced. We are glad to find that when the defectors’ loss is equal to or larger than the altruistic cooperators’ punishment cost, the mechanism could make great effect. In addition, the role of heterogeneous defectors depends on the relationship between the punishment cost and the defectors’ loss.