Effect of Heterogeneous Investments on the Evolution of Cooperation in Spatial Public Goods Game

“…How cooperation in social dilemmas survives and is enhanced is still an open question, attracting a lot of interest across a myriad of disciplines, such as physics, mathematics, biology, computer science and ecology. With the aid of evolutionary game theory, many statistical physics methods (like Monte Carlo, MC simulation, meanfield theory and pair approximation) have been successfully applied to cope with this issue [1][2][3][4][5][6], and several mechanisms have been proposed to be at the basis of cooperation enhancement, such as tit-for-tat [7], win-staylose shift [8,9], voluntary participation [10,11], spatially structured populations [12][13][14][15][16][17][18], heterogeneity or diversity [19,20], mobility of players [21][22][23], and co-evolution of dynamical rules [24,25]. In particular, Nowak [5] categorized all these cases under five possible scenarios: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, group selection and network reciprocity, (for a comprehensive review of the subject, we address the reader to [26,27]).…”