The increased risk of joint venture promotes social cooperation.

• Main Authors: Te Wu, Feng Fu, Yanling Zhang, Long Wang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2013-01-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3672156?pdf=render

The joint venture of many members is common both in animal world and human society. In these public enterprizes, highly cooperative groups are more likely to while low cooperative groups are still possible but not probable to succeed. Existent literature mostly focuses on the traditional public goods game, in which cooperators create public wealth unconditionally and benefit all group members unbiasedly. We here institute a model addressing this public goods dilemma with incorporating the public resource foraging failure risk. Risk-averse individuals tend to lead a autarkic life, while risk-preferential ones tend to participate in the risky public goods game. For participants, group's success relies on its cooperativeness, with increasing contribution leading to increasing success likelihood. We introduce a function with one tunable parameter to describe the risk removal pattern and study in detail three representative classes. Analytical results show that the widely replicated population dynamics of cyclical dominance of loner, cooperator and defector disappear, while most of the time loners act as savors while eventually they also disappear. Depending on the way that group's success relies on its cooperativeness, either cooperators pervade the entire population or they coexist with defectors. Even in the later case, cooperators still hold salient superiority in number as some defectors also survive by parasitizing. The harder the joint venture succeeds, the higher level of cooperation once cooperators can win the evolutionary race. Our work may enrich the literature concerning the risky public goods games.