Regular Article

Promoting cooperation by reputation-based payoff transfer mechanism in public goods game

College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, P.R. China

^a e-mail: yr0285@163.com

Received: 24 December 2019
Received in final form: 20 March 2020
Published online: 20 May 2020

Abstract

Considering the impact of reputation on social benefits of people in reality, we introduce the reputation-based payoff transfer mechanism to investigate cooperative behaviors on the lattice in the process of public goods game (PGG). Here individual reputation is quantified by score rules and players are ranked based on reputation scores. Payoffs can be transferred from low-ranking groups to high-ranking individuals via three different kinds of transfer ratios, and thus players with high rank receive endogenous bonus without the external funds. Numerical simulations show that the level of cooperation in PGG gets slightly increase in the type of conditional transfer ratios. But cooperation can be significantly promoted and maintained at a high level in the type of effective transfer ratios. The effect of transfer strength (s) is also considered. The greater the s, the higher the cooperation level for most transfer ratios. And when the optimal transfer ratio condition is met, cooperation can quickly be emergent and nearly reach global cooperation even if the synergy factor is small. Our research is helpful to shed light on the emergence of cooperation in PGG and provides useful advices for organizers to promote the collective supply of public goods from the perspective of reputation management.