Evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods game based on heterogenous social preferences and dynamic punishment

Abstract

The mechanism of promoting cooperation in the public goods game has always been concerned by scholars. However, most of the existing studies are based on the premise that participants are self-interested. In order to explore why some sellers on e-commerce platforms voluntarily maintain the platform’s reputation, we incorporate heterogeneous social preferences of sellers into the spatial public goods game. We find that heterogeneous social preferences can enhance cooperation by improving collective rationality. Specifically, the altruistic preference of sellers can greatly reduce free-riding behavior, while the inequality aversion preference has a little inhibitory effect. Interestingly, when the benefit of maintaining the platform’s reputation is relatively high, the reciprocal preference can inhibit cooperation, but it can promote cooperation when the benefit is relatively small. This is due to the existence of some loosely connected but stable cooperative or defective clusters of sellers in e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic punishment mechanism to punish free riders. We observe that the dynamic punishment mechanism is more effective than the static punishment mechanism in solving the second-order free-riding problem faced by punishers. Increasing the enhancement factor of public goods is identified as a fundamental approach to mitigating this problem.