Friendly-rivalry solution to the iterated n-person public-goods game

Area of Science:

• Game Theory
• Evolutionary Game Theory
• Computational Economics

Background:

• Cooperation is difficult to maintain in games with many error-prone individuals.
• A 'friendly-rivalry' strategy aims for full cooperation without allowing co-players to gain an advantage.
• Previous work defined such a strategy for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with errors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To generalize the 'friendly-rivalry' strategy for the iterated n-person public-goods game.
• To analyze the evolutionary robustness and performance of the proposed strategy.

Main Methods:

• Generalizing five specific rules from the Prisoner's Dilemma to the n-person public-goods game.
• The strategy decision incorporates information from the previous m = 2n - 1 rounds.
• Evolutionary simulations were conducted to assess strategy performance.

Main Results:

• A novel 'friendly-rivalry' strategy was constructed for the iterated n-person public-goods game.
• The strategy exhibits inherent evolutionary robustness for n=2.
• Simulations showed excellent performance across various conditions for n=2 and n=3.

Conclusions:

• The generalized 'friendly-rivalry' strategy effectively promotes cooperation in the iterated n-person public-goods game.
• The strategy is robust and performs well in evolutionary settings, even with errors.
• This approach offers a viable method for establishing cooperation in complex group interactions.