Search

The interplay between the strategies and environments has been shown to affect the evolution of cooperative behavior. Typically, it is assumed that the strategy-related changeable game environment alters the payoffs of strategic interactions, while the reciprocity mechanisms among interactions are usually ignored. Here we respectively study the feedback-evolving games with the direct and indirect mechanisms. This extension is facilitated by assuming the essential properties of reciprocity interactions are incorporated into the linear state-dependent payoff matrix. By the replicator dynamic process, it is found that except for the heteroclinic cycle or internal equilibrium present in the previous model, full cooperation and the highest level of the environment state can be dominant. Furthermore, by exploring the evolutionary dynamics in the local reciprocity-embedded feedback subsystems, we further stress that the most expected system states will be realized so long as cooperation is favored through the reciprocity manner in the circumstance that defection dominates. Even in terms of the internal equilibrium, the higher environmental state level can be enabled without the loss of cooperation. The results may explain the effectiveness of the reciprocity mechanism in avoiding the traps of social dilemmas within the time-invariant game interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been proved that cognitive biases widely exist in various social realities and lead to unprecedented consequences by affecting individual judgment and decision-making processes in distinct ways. To further explore the influence of changeable cognitive bias, we introduce a heterogeneous population and learning process that can be influenced by cognitive bias into the threshold public goods game (TPGG). Specifically, additional parameters describing the heterogeneity and updating speed of bias are employed. The combined effects of bias and the inherent parameters in the TPGG model on the evolution of cooperation are explored. Numerical simulation results show that the heterogeneity of cognitive bias exhibits diametrically opposite effects when the threshold is relatively low and high, and the effect of incentives based on fixed reward and adjustable punishment are distorted by heterogeneous cognitive biases as well. In addition, the process of social learning forces individuals to update their beliefs toward the direction of obtaining a higher payoff. Different learning rates eventually lead to distinct levels of cooperation by changing the distribution of cognitive bias when the population reaches the evolutionary steady state. Our work extends the research framework on cognitive bias from the perspective of population heterogeneity and explores the impact of individuals' learning ability on personal bias and cooperative behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punishment, as an incentive mechanism, was normally carried out with a certain fixed probability in previous studies. But in a real legal society, recidivists are punished more than first offenders. Learning from this idea, we introduce a new form of graded punishment in the spatial public goods game, in which the punishment probability changes dynamically according to the number of consecutive defections in the games. Our logic is that the more times a player defects continuously, the greater the probability that he will be punished. To demonstrate the effect of the graded punishment mechanism, we serve the traditional fixed probability punishment as the reference model. By comparing the simulation results of the two models, we find that graded punishment can solve social dilemmas, and in most cases, it is more conducive to cooperation than traditional probabilistic punishment. However, with the increase in the punishment cost or the decline of the fine, the advantage of graded punishment weakens. Additionally, if the initial punishment probability is small enough and the punishment cost is close to the fine, the effect of the graded punishment is not as good as the traditional punishment. Therefore, it has pros and cons in promoting cooperation. These results provide a new perspective on the punishment mechanism in promoting cooperation and establish a basis for choosing more effective incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncertainty is ubiquitous and has a significant impact on individuals' actions. Inspired by the reality, this paper considers a population affected by changing evolutionary environments with both payoff noise and demographic noise. Meanwhile, we discuss two different types of changing environments, one with deterministic fluctuations and the other with stochastic fluctuations. To explore how changing environments influence the dynamics of cooperation, we first build a theoretical model, which introduces a geometric mean instead of an arithmetic mean of growth rate to present a time-dependent performance of cooperation. Through simulation results, we find that a fluctuating environment with the two noises is beneficial for promoting cooperation, and a deterministic environment is better at promoting cooperation than a stochastic environment. Besides, both deterministic and stochastic fluctuations can make the cooperative species get a higher payoff than the defective species, which is the cause of cooperation promotion. Moreover, in an environment with stochastic noises, the type of time-dependent noise distribution has little impact on evolutionary dynamics. In addition, a high noise variance is beneficial for promoting cooperation, but not for maintaining cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consumers' strategic behavior and psychological perception have impact on supply chains. In this paper, we consider a supply chain with one supplier and one retailer to study the influence of disappointment-aversion strategic (DAS) consumers on supply chain members' decisions and performance. The results of this study show that strategic consumers can reduce the profit levels of such a supply chain, whilst DAS consumers can alleviate this effect. We also study the effectiveness of a quantity commitment strategy for a centralized supply chain when faced with DAS consumers. Under certain conditions, the quantity commitment strategy can further reduce the loss of profit caused by strategic consumers. Then the maximum profit of the centralized supply chain under the quantity commitment strategy is used as a benchmark. We then analyze the coordination efficiency and implementability of a wholesale price contract and a price subsidy contract respectively in a decentralized supply chain. The results show that the wholesale price contract can achieve the optimal profit benchmark of the centralized supply chain, but it can only realize fixed profit allocation to supply chain members; the price subsidy contract can not only achieve the optimal profit of the centralized supply chain but also make arbitrary profit allocation among chain members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address a general housing market problem with a set of agents and a set of houses. Each agent has a weak ordinal preference list that allows ties on houses as well as an initial endowment; moreover, each agent wishes to reallocate to a better house on the housing market. In this work, we reduces the complexity of the family of top trading cycles algorithms by selecting a specific house from the preferred set during the trading phase. The rule of construction digraphs is used to select an appropriate house. Based on these digraphs, we propose an extended top trading cycles algorithm with complexity O (n 2 r) , where n is the number of agents and r is the maximum length of ties in the preference lists. The algorithm complexity is lower than that of the state-of-the-art algorithms. We show that the proposed algorithm is individually rational, Pareto efficient, and strategy-proof. It thus overcomes the limitations of a classic top trading cycles algorithm, and features Pareto efficiency and strategy-proofness on the weak preference domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of evolutionary games on networks has revealed the impact of population structure on evolutionary dynamics. Unlike the case in well-mixed population where defection is favored by natural selection, certain types of networks have shown to favor cooperation. However, most previous research work has been focusing on frequency-based analysis, and emphasized on the update strategy adopted by each player, and thus generally considered the group of players with the same strategy as a whole. While it is powerful in deriving analytic results using this approach, the heterogeneity of players within such groups is effectively overlooked. In this paper, we attempt to emphasize more on the heterogeneity of players that comes from the network structure in evolutionary dynamics. Particularly, the prestige of a player is represented by its centrality, and it is reflected in an adapted payoff function. We provide several viable centrality measures that can be calculated using the adjacency matrix of the network. The relation between different centrality measures of the invader and the fixation of cooperation is analyzed via computational simulations. Results show that in the proposed model, compared to other three centrality measures, invaders with maximum betweenness centrality have significant advantage in terms of the fixation probability of cooperation, in both scale-free and small-world networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the effect of veto right on players' income in multi-player dynamic bargaining game. Based on a basic multi-person dynamic bargaining model generalized by the Rubinstein's two-person alternating-offer bargaining model, the authors construct a dynamic multi-player bargaining game with veto players by adding a constraint to its negotiation process, which is obtained by studying the influence of exercising the veto right exercised by veto players. The authors emphatically describe the strategic game form of this dynamic bargaining game and study its equilibrium, then we analyze the relationship between the minimum acceptable payoff of the veto players and the equilibrium income. The research shows that veto right may increase the benefits of veto players and decrease the benefits of non-veto players. Veto players will not affect the players' benefits and the form of equilibrium when the minimum acceptable payoff of every veto player is relatively low. When the minimum acceptable payoff of the veto player is high enough, he can only get the minimum acceptable payoff, and his benefit increases as his minimum acceptable payoff increases. In this case, the veto player has intention to obtain more resources by presenting a higher minimum acceptable payoff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The optimal allocation of sediment resources needs to balance three objectives including ecological, economic, and social benefits so as to realize sustainable development of sediment resources. This study aims to apply fuzzy programming and bargaining approaches to solve the problem of optimal allocation of sediment resources. Firstly, Pareto-optimal solutions of multi-objective optimization were introduced, and the multi-objective optimal allocation model of sediment resources and fuzzy programming model was constructed. Then, from the perspective of multiplayer cooperation, the optimal allocation model of sediment resources was transformed into a game model by using Nash bargaining, and Nash bargaining solution was obtained as the optimal equilibrium strategy. Finally, the influence of different disagreement utility points and bargaining weights on the results was discussed, and the results of Nash bargaining and fuzzy programming methods were compared and analyzed. Results corroborate that Nash bargaining can achieve the cooperative optimization of multiple objectives with competitive relationship and obtain satisfactory scheme. Disagreement utility points and bargaining weights have a certain impact on the optimization results. The solution of fuzzy programming is close to that of Nash bargaining, which provides different ideas for multi-objective optimization problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The document is a correction notice for an article titled "Cooperation dynamics in public goods games with evolving cognitive bias" published in the journal Management System Engineering. The authors reported an error in Equation 4 of the original article and provided the corrected version. The correction has been made to the original article. The authors of the article are Ji Quan, Haoze Li, and Xianjia Wang. [Extracted from the article]

Negotiation and bargaining are the common means of solving economic and political problems. In these problems, players often form coalitions for activities. In the environment with externalities, the worth of a coalition depends not only on itself, but also on the coalition structure of other players. This paper studies dynamic bargaining games with externalities and analyzes the effect of externality on the payoffs of players. Based on the Rubinstein's two-person alternating-offer bargaining game, the authors study a two-person dynamic game with externalities and extend it to the case of n players. The research shows that externality affects the results of this bargaining game, and coalition structures affect the payoffs of players. Players in this bargaining game can always form grand coalition if an allocation is effective, but some coalition structures may not be formed under some certain conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a single-period model comprised of an original manufacturer (OM) who produces only new products and a remanufacturer who collects used products from consumers and produces remanufactured products. The OM and the remanufacturer compete in the product market. We examine the effects of government subsidy as a means to promote remanufacturing activity. In particularly, we consider three subsidy options: subsidy to remanufacturer, subsidy to consumers, and subsidy shared by remanufacturer and consumers. We find that the introduction of government subsidy on remanufacturer or consumers always increases remanufacturing activity. We also find that subsidy to remanufacturer is the best subsidy option, because subsidy to remanufacturer results in lower price of remanufactured products, thus leading to higher consumer surplus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mechanisms and conditions for the spontaneous emergence of cooperation in multi-player social dilemma games remain an open question. This paper focuses on stochastic evolutionary optional public goods games with different exclusion strategies. We introduce four strategy types in the population, namely, cooperation, defection, loner and exclusion. Synchronous and asynchronous exclusion forms have been compared in finite-sized, well-mixed and structured populations. In addition, we verify that the asynchronous exclusion mechanism is indeed better than the synchronous exclusion mechanism in all cases. The benefits of the asynchronous exclusion are measured by comparing the probability that the system chooses the cooperative states in the two situations. In the well-mixed population cases, only when the investment amplification factor is small and the probability of exclusion success is high will the asynchronous exclusion mechanism have a relatively large advantage in promoting cooperation. However, in the structured population cases, the range of the investment amplification factor, in which the asynchronous exclusion mechanism has relatively large advantages in promoting cooperation, is somewhat different and is mainly in the middle of the interval under our parameters. Our study further corroborated that when non-participation and exclusion strategies exist, a structured population does not necessarily promote cooperation compared with a well-mixed population for some parameter combinations. Thus, we acquire a good understanding of the emergence of cooperation under different exclusion mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]