Chen T, Wu Z, Wang L. Disseminators or silencers: The effect of information diffusion intensity on cooperation in public goods game.
J Theor Biol 2018;
452:47-55. [PMID:
29678693 DOI:
10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.04.024]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/24/2018] [Revised: 04/03/2018] [Accepted: 04/16/2018] [Indexed: 10/17/2022]
Abstract
In the Network Era, with the emergence of various instant communication tools, the public are easier to be disseminators than ever. But we have often heard that silence is golden. Inspired by this fact, we investigate that whether the existence of disseminators is beneficial to promote cooperation in the provision of public culture services. To answer this interesting question, we classify disseminators as neutral disseminators, positive disseminators and negative disseminators. And four models are set up, namely, neutral disseminator model (MBD), positive disseminator model (MPD), negative disseminator model (MND) and silencer model (MS). By numerical simulations, it is observed that MND, MBD, MPD and MS perform best in 70%, 25%, 5% and 0% of cases, respectively. And the advantage of the best model is different in various situations. Our work highlights that criticizing instead of tolerating defection is always the best choice to promote cooperation, except the population is relatively large or the agent's reference range fluctuates violently. Besides, under the mechanisms of reputation and conformity, the organizer can not play a significant role on promoting cooperation by intervening information transfer in some conditions, especially when the link-neighbor degree is very low.
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