Heterogeneous investment promotes cooperation in spatial public goods game on hypergraphs

Most previous studies on the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation have been based on pairwise interactions, and heterogeneous investment has been considered to play a nontrivial role in enhancing cooperation. However, the interactions among individuals in real systems are not always binary ones, but often include higher-order interactions. In our work, a spatial public goods game on uniform random hypergraphs is proposed to study the effects of heterogeneous investment on cooperation evolution. Heterogeneous investment is introduced by the fraction of cooperators in a hyperedge. From numerical simulation results , we find that the introduction of heterogeneous investment can pro-mote cooperation on uniform random hypergraphs. Moreover, we provide a theoretical analysis of the critical value of the reduced synergy factor rc through the replicator approximation, and the theoretical predictions are in qualitative agreement with the numerical simulation results. Furthermore, the robustness with respect to the number of hyperedges is checked, and it is found that the conclusions remain the same.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study investigates the effects of heterogeneous investment on the evolution of cooperation in a spatial public goods game on uniform random hypergraphs. The results show that heterogeneous investment can promote cooperation on uniform random hypergraphs. The theoretical predictions of the critical value of the reduced synergy factor rc are in qualitative agreement with the numerical simulation results, and the conclusions remain the same when considering the robustness with respect to the number of hyperedges.