Resolving public goods dilemma by giving the poor more support

Abstract The question of resource allocation has been the focus issue in social and natural science. Should we narrow the gap between the rich and poor? Or should we increase the income inequality? Inspired by this matter, we propose a payoff redistribution model and explore which case can evaluate the cooperative level in public goods game. Specifically, we use a single parameter α to control the above two scenarios. Positive α increases the income inequality between rich and poor, while negative α ensures this equality and the case of α = 0 turns our model to the symmetric case, where there is no payoff redistribution effect. Extensive simulation shows that when we narrow the gap between the rich and poor, cooperation can be maintained, conversely, if this income inequality is increased, the cooperative groups are destroyed. Our work thus provides a novel clue to explore this problem especially from the viewpoint of evolutionary game theory.