Reputation-based investment strategy promotes cooperation in public goods games

In this paper, we study the effects of reputation-based investment strategy on cooperation in the spatial public goods games. The investment of one player to a particular group depends on the reputation of the group organizer. We define a player's reputation as the frequency of cooperation in the past few time steps. Our results show that the cooperation level can be remarkably enhanced if a player invests more in the group organized by a higher-reputation leader. We explain this phenomenon by analyzing the income gap between cooperators and defectors at the interface that separates clusters of the two competing strategies. To have an intuitive understanding, we plot the snapshots of spatial distributions of players with different reputation. The effects of the memory length are also studied. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.