The efficiency of institutionalized punishment is studied by evaluating the stationary states in the spatial public goods game comprising unconditional defectors, cooperators, and cooperating pool-punishers as the three competing strategies. Fine and cost of pool-punishment are considered as the...

We study the evolution of cooperation in public goods games on the square lattice, focusing on the effects that are brought about by different sizes of groups where individuals collect their payoffs and search for potential strategy donors. We find that increasing the group size does not...

Prevalence of cooperation within groups of selfish individuals is puzzling in that it contradicts with the basic premise of natural selection. Favoring players with higher fitness, the latter is key for understanding the challenges faced by cooperators when competing with defectors. Evolutionary...

We study the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games with four competing strategies: cooperators, defectors, punishing cooperators, and punishing defectors. To explore the robustness of the cooperation-promoting effect of costly punishment, besides the usual strategy adoption...

We study the evolution of cooperation under the assumption that the collective benefits of group membership can only be harvested if the fraction of cooperators within the group, i.e., their critical mass, exceeds a threshold value. Considering structured populations, we show that a moderate...

We study the evolution of cooperation in spatial public goods games where, besides the classical strategies of cooperation (C) and defection (D), we consider punishing cooperators (PC) or punishing defectors (PD) as an additional strategy. Using a minimalist modeling approach, our goal is to...

The fact that individuals will most likely behave differently in different situations begets the introduction of conditional strategies. Inspired by this, we study the evolution of cooperation in the spatial public goods game, where besides unconditional cooperators and defectors, also different...

Leaving the joint enterprise when defection is unveiled is always a viable option to avoid being exploited. Although loner strategy helps the population not to be trapped into the tragedy of the commons state, it could offer only a modest income for non-participants. In this paper we demonstrate...

Established already in the Biblical times, the Matthew effect stands for the fact that in societies rich tend to get richer and the potent even more powerful. Here we investigate a game theoretical model describing the evolution of cooperation on structured populations where the distribution of...

Strategy changes are an essential part of evolutionary games. Here we introduce a simple rule that, depending on the value of a single parameter w, influences the selection of players that are considered as potential sources of the new strategy. For positive w players with high payoffs will be...