Locality based wealth rule favors cooperation in costly public goods games

Most previous investigations on spatial Public Goods Games (PGGs) assume that individuals are self-organized and all are engaged in every available groups, which is in sharp contrast with realistic situations, where players may follow some local rules of whether they can participant or not. In this paper we embed the locality based wealth rule into self-adaptive region based mechanism to study the evolution of cooperation. When deciding about participation, both individual wealth of a player and qualification threshold of its local region are considered. Player whose wealth exceeds its local limit is allowed to participant in the joint venture by paying some entrance fee, which is independent of its strategy of whether cooperate or not. Otherwise, they are forbidden in the current round. Our result shows that the proposed mechanism can boost the emergence and maintenance of cooperation, with moderate values of controlling strength, and when the entrance fee is not harsh. Furthermore, small region segmentation scheme favors cooperation better with small controlling factor, whereas larger regional size can slow down the extinction process of cooperators when controlling factor is relatively high. We hope that our findings could shed light on better understanding of the emergence of cooperation among structured populations. (c) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.