Friendly-rivalry solution to the iterated n-person public-goods game

Repeated interaction promotes cooperation among rational individuals under the shadow of future, but it is hard to maintain cooperation when a large number of error-prone individuals are involved. One way to construct a cooperative Nash equilibrium is to find a ‘friendly rivalry’ strategy, which aims at full cooperation but never allows the co-players to be better off. Recently it has been shown that for the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma in the presence of error, a friendly rival can be designed with the following five rules: Cooperate if everyone did, accept punishment for your own mistake, punish defection, recover cooperation if you find a chance, and defect in all the other circumstances. In this work, we construct such a friendly-rivalry strategy for the iterated n-person public-goods game by generalizing those five rules. The resulting strategy makes a decision with referring to the previous m = 2n − 1 rounds. A friendly-rivalry strategy inherently has evolutionary robustness in the sense that no mutant strategy has higher fixation probability in this population than that of neutral drift, and our evolutionary simulation indeed shows excellent performance of the proposed strategy in a broad range of environmental conditions. Author summary How to maintain cooperation among a number of self-interested individuals is a difficult problem, especially if they can sometimes commit error. In this work, we propose a strategy for the iterated n-person public-goods game based on the following five rules: Cooperate if everyone did, accept punishment for your own mistake, punish others’ defection, recover cooperation if you find a chance, and defect in all the other circumstances. These rules are not far from actual human behavior, and the resulting strategy guarantees three advantages: First, if everyone uses it, full cooperation is recovered even if error occurs with small probability. Second, the player of this strategy always never obtains a lower long-term payoff than any of the co-players. Third, if the co-players are unconditional cooperators, it obtains a strictly higher long-term payoff than theirs. Therefore, if everyone uses this strategy, no one has a reason to change it. Furthermore, our simulation shows that this strategy will become highly abundant over long time scales due to its robustness against the invasion of other strategies. In this sense, the repeated social dilemma is solved for an arbitrary number of players.