Multi-stage Dynamic Balancing of Free-Riding in Public Goods Game Applications
摘要
In public goods applications, the need to expand their infrastructure is often of critical and urgent importance from a technical and economic perspective. Still, required investments are decided in accordance with social benefits and are realized on the voluntary participation of all the members who grant financial profit from the project. Public goods game (PGG) modeling is an acceptable tool of analysis for these cases, but it certainly suffers from the selfish behavior of those members/agents wishing to increase their payoff by avoiding contribution to the common endeavor and by free-riding on the contributions of others. To reduce or eliminate or even reverse the free-riding impact, a dynamically deployed balancing procedure is introduced in the set of the standard simple payoff equations, having the following features. It divides the agents into the punished category and the rewarded one; determines the level of punishment or reward in a sequential, gradually applied (repeated mode) manner; achieves a more effective impact on the punished agents than the rewarded ones; results in a guaranteed stable new Nash equilibrium for any level of punishment/reward action; may provide at any stage a surplus in the sum of payoffs. Thus, the purpose is twofold: Firstly, to limit selfish behavior by constituting incentives that gradually mitigate the free-riding benefit. Secondly, to provide the possibility for any agent who is not ready to participate in time in the common project, to have a second chance by gradually reacting to his payoff reduction or by offering to a surplus for future common investments. In any case, the most consistent agents are rewarded by increasing their payoffs.