The evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals have been a major focus of evolutionary studies over the last decades. Models of this kind are traditionally cast in the framework of game theory. In cooperation games, individuals accumulate payoff according to their and their partners’ strategies.
One of the most well-studied cooperation games, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, describes the interaction between just two players. Most biological situations, however, involve larger groups of individuals, resulting in situations that can be described by an n-person analogue of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, known as the Public Goods Game.
In this study, we will extend the Public Goods Game from one to several public goods (multi-public-good game). This extension allows for more realistic social and biological situations: a community consisting of n individuals, might require several different public goods, with each individual contributing to none, some, or all of these. During the YSSP, a simple baseline model and some of its socially or biologically relevant extensions will be investigated in detail.
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
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