title: Heterogeneous resource allocation can change social hierarchy in public goods games.
abstract: Public goods games (PGGs) represent one of the most useful tools to study group interactions. However, even if they could provide an explanation for the emergence and stability of cooperation in modern societies, they are not able to reproduce some key features observed in social and economical interactions. The typical shape of wealth distribution-known as Pareto Law-and the microscopic organization of wealth production are two of them. Here, we introduce a modification to the classical formulation of PGGs that allows for the emergence of both of these features from first principles. Unlike traditional PGGs, where players contribute equally to all the games in which they participate, we allow individuals to redistribute their contribution according to what they earned in previous rounds. Results from numerical simulations show that not only a Pareto distribution for the pay-offs naturally emerges but also that if players do not invest enough in one round they can act as defectors even if they are formally cooperators. Our results not only give an explanation for wealth heterogeneity observed in real data but also point to a conceptual change on cooperation in collective dilemmas.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza 50009, Spain; Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza 50009, Spain.
authors.forename: Sandro
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-6202-3302
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Meloni
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Computer Vision and System (Ministry of Education) and Tianjin Key Laboratory of Intelligence Computing and Novel Software Technology , Tianjin University of Technology , Tianjin 300384, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Cheng-Yi
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Xia
authors.affiliation: Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza 50009, Spain; Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza 50009, Spain; Complex Networks and Systems Lagrange Lab, Institute for Scientific Interchange, Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Yamir
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Moreno
keywords: Pareto Law; adaptive dynamics; complex networks; public goods games