Redistribution promotes cooperation in spatial public goods games under aspiration dynamics

Redistribution is an important regulation mechanism commonly used to benefit the whole society by transferring capital to low-income members. How redistribution influences the evolution of cooperation, which has a crucial impact on the sustainable development of society, is studied in this paper. Spatial public goods game models are established and players utilize aspiration dynamics as the updating rule where strategies are chosen by comparing payoffs with an expected aspiration. Both the homogeneous aspiration and heterogeneous aspiration distributions are considered. It is found that redistribution significantly promotes the cooperation. However, with the increase of individual greed, the growth rate of cooperation level has a peak with the increase of redistribution proportion. Furthermore, the effect of redistribution on cooperative promotion under different aspiration distributions varies with the proportion of redistribution. Moreover, the evolutionary results in heterogeneous networks and regular graphs are compared. It is found that the promotion of redistribution for cooperation is more evident in heterogeneous networks, especially when hub nodes have larger aspirations. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.