IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0013471.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How Wealth Accumulation Can Promote Cooperation

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas Chadefaux
  • Dirk Helbing

Abstract

Explaining the emergence and stability of cooperation has been a central challenge in biology, economics and sociology. Unfortunately, the mechanisms known to promote it either require elaborate strategies or hold only under restrictive conditions. Here, we report the emergence, survival, and frequent domination of cooperation in a world characterized by selfishness and a strong temptation to defect, when individuals can accumulate wealth. In particular, we study games with local adaptation such as the prisoner's dilemma, to which we add heterogeneity in payoffs. In our model, agents accumulate wealth and invest some of it in their interactions. The larger the investment, the more can potentially be gained or lost, so that present gains affect future payoffs. We find that cooperation survives for a far wider range of parameters than without wealth accumulation and, even more strikingly, that it often dominates defection. This is in stark contrast to the traditional evolutionary prisoner's dilemma in particular, in which cooperation rarely survives and almost never thrives. With the inequality we introduce, on the contrary, cooperators do better than defectors, even without any strategic behavior or exogenously imposed strategies. These results have important consequences for our understanding of the type of social and economic arrangements that are optimal and efficient.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas Chadefaux & Dirk Helbing, 2010. "How Wealth Accumulation Can Promote Cooperation," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(10), pages 1-7, October.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0013471
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013471
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013471
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013471&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0013471?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Francisco C. Santos & Marta D. Santos & Jorge M. Pacheco, 2008. "Social diversity promotes the emergence of cooperation in public goods games," Nature, Nature, vol. 454(7201), pages 213-216, July.
    2. Paul Collier & Anke Hoeffler, 2004. "Greed and grievance in civil war," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 56(4), pages 563-595, October.
    3. Martin A. Nowak & Karl Sigmund, 2005. "Evolution of indirect reciprocity," Nature, Nature, vol. 437(7063), pages 1291-1298, October.
    4. Hessel Oosterbeek & Randolph Sloof & Gijs van de Kuilen, 2004. "Cultural Differences in Ultimatum Game Experiments: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 7(2), pages 171-188, June.
    5. Szolnoki, Attila & Perc, Matjaž & Danku, Zsuzsa, 2008. "Towards effective payoffs in the prisoner’s dilemma game on scale-free networks," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 387(8), pages 2075-2082.
    6. Christoph Hauert & Michael Doebeli, 2004. "Spatial structure often inhibits the evolution of cooperation in the snowdrift game," Nature, Nature, vol. 428(6983), pages 643-646, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Li, Jing & Wang, Jiang, 2018. "Locality based wealth rule favors cooperation in costly public goods games," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 1-7.
    2. Wang, Jianwei & Chen, Wei & Yu, Fengyuan & He, Jialu & Xu, Wenshu, 2022. "Wealth-based rule favors cooperation in costly public goods games when individual selection is inevitable," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 414(C).
    3. Smaldino, Paul E. & Schank, Jeffrey C., 2012. "Movement patterns, social dynamics, and the evolution of cooperation," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 82(1), pages 48-58.
    4. Markus Brede, 2013. "Short Versus Long Term Benefits and the Evolution of Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma Game," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(2), pages 1-9, February.
    5. Thomas Chadefaux & Dirk Helbing, 2012. "The Rationality of Prejudices," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(2), pages 1-6, February.
    6. Tao Wang & Keke Huang & Zhen Wang & Xiaoping Zheng, 2015. "Impact of Small Groups with Heterogeneous Preference on Behavioral Evolution in Population Evacuation," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(3), pages 1-13, March.
    7. Chris Girard, 2020. "Globalization and the erosion of geo-ethnic checkpoints: evolving signal-boundary systems at the edge of chaos," Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Springer, vol. 17(1), pages 93-109, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Liang, Rizhou & Zhang, Jiqiang & Zheng, Guozhong & Chen, Li, 2021. "Social hierarchy promotes the cooperation prevalence," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 567(C).
    2. Lv, Shaojie & Wang, Xianjia, 2020. "The impact of heterogeneous investments on the evolution of cooperation in public goods game with exclusion," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 372(C).
    3. Su, Qi & Li, Aming & Wang, Long, 2017. "Spatial structure favors cooperative behavior in the snowdrift game with multiple interactive dynamics," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 468(C), pages 299-306.
    4. Yanlong Zhang, 2015. "Partially and Wholly Overlapping Networks: The Evolutionary Dynamics of Social Dilemmas on Social Networks," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 46(1), pages 1-14, June.
    5. Du, Faqi & Fu, Feng, 2013. "Quantifying the impact of noise on macroscopic organization of cooperation in spatial games," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 35-44.
    6. Jorge Peña & Yannick Rochat, 2012. "Bipartite Graphs as Models of Population Structures in Evolutionary Multiplayer Games," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(9), pages 1-13, September.
    7. Zou, Kuan & Han, Wenchen & Zhang, Lan & Huang, Changwei, 2024. "The spatial public goods game on hypergraphs with heterogeneous investment," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 466(C).
    8. Dong, Yukun & Xu, Hedong & Fan, Suohai, 2019. "Memory-based stag hunt game on regular lattices," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 519(C), pages 247-255.
    9. Jin, Jiahua & Chu, Chen & Shen, Chen & Guo, Hao & Geng, Yini & Jia, Danyang & Shi, Lei, 2018. "Heterogeneous fitness promotes cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 141-146.
    10. Yongkui Liu & Xiaojie Chen & Lin Zhang & Long Wang & Matjaž Perc, 2012. "Win-Stay-Lose-Learn Promotes Cooperation in the Spatial Prisoner's Dilemma Game," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(2), pages 1-8, February.
    11. Flávio L Pinheiro & Jorge M Pacheco & Francisco C Santos, 2012. "From Local to Global Dilemmas in Social Networks," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(2), pages 1-6, February.
    12. Wang, Chaoqian & Huang, Chaochao, 2022. "Between local and global strategy updating in public goods game," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 606(C).
    13. Ye, Ye & Hang, Xiao Rong & Koh, Jin Ming & Miszczak, Jarosław Adam & Cheong, Kang Hao & Xie, Neng-gang, 2020. "Passive network evolution promotes group welfare in complex networks," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 130(C).
    14. Jorge M Pacheco & Flávio L Pinheiro & Francisco C Santos, 2009. "Population Structure Induces a Symmetry Breaking Favoring the Emergence of Cooperation," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(12), pages 1-7, December.
    15. Wes Maciejewski & Feng Fu & Christoph Hauert, 2014. "Evolutionary Game Dynamics in Populations with Heterogenous Structures," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(4), pages 1-16, April.
    16. Bandyopadhyay, Abhirup & Kar, Samarjit, 2018. "Coevolution of cooperation and network structure in social dilemmas in evolutionary dynamic complex network," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 320(C), pages 710-730.
    17. Ye, Ye & Xie, Neng-gang & Wang, Lu & Cen, Yu-wan, 2013. "The multi-agent Parrondo’s model based on the network evolution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 392(21), pages 5414-5421.
    18. Swami Iyer & Timothy Killingback, 2020. "Evolution of Cooperation in Social Dilemmas with Assortative Interactions," Games, MDPI, vol. 11(4), pages 1-31, September.
    19. Feng, Minyu & Han, Songlin & Li, Qin & Wu, Juan & Kurths, Jürgen, 2023. "Harmful strong agents and asymmetric interaction can promote the frequency of cooperation in the snowdrift game," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 175(P2).
    20. Swami Iyer & Timothy Killingback, 2016. "Evolution of Cooperation in Social Dilemmas on Complex Networks," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(2), pages 1-25, February.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0013471. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.