A graph-based model for public goods with leaderships

摘要

So far, research into pubic goods games has been limited to studying the effects of leadership in an experimental works. The results found differ according to the population studied, the number of participants and the country chosen, which makes ideas imprecise when it comes to understanding how cooperation evolves. In this article we try to generalize these works by introducing an agent-based model to simulate interactions in public goods games on a graph, and study the impact of leadership by example on the evolution of cooperation among selfish individuals in a scale-free network. Consistent with recent experimental studies, our results show that leading by example leads to a significant increase in the overall contribution and the group’s welfare, as compared to the situation without leadership. We have demonstrated also that strong leaders have an important role in promoting optimal cooperation in public goods games and consequently they bring more welfare to their groups.