Insurance optimizes complex interactive and cooperative behaviors in public goods games.

• Main Author: Jinming Du
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2018-01-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC5959058?pdf=render

Global cooperation is urgently needed to prevent risks of world-wide extreme events and disasters for sustainable development. In human societies, however, there exists bias toward interacting with partners with similar characteristics, but not contributing globally. We study how complex interactive behaviors evolve under risks through proposing a threshold public goods game model. In the model, individuals either play games with participants who own the same phenotype, or contribute to the collective target of global public goods. We further introduce an insurance compensation mechanism into the model to probe the evolution of global cooperation. It is found that the introduction of the insurance remarkably promotes the emergence of global cooperative behavior and inhibits the tendency to play games only with individuals of the same phenotype. Besides, contrary to models without insurance, global cooperation is strengthened with the increase of imitation intensities. In addition, high risk and high threshold are in favor of global cooperation.