Maintenance of cooperation in a public goods game: A new decision-making criterion with incomplete information

Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” prophesies the inescapable collapse of many human enterprises. The emergence and abundance of cooperation in animal and human societies is a challenging puzzle to evolutionary theory. In this work, we introduce a new decision-making criterion into a voluntary public goods game with incomplete information and choose successful strategies according to previous payoffs for a certain strategy as well as the risk-averse benefit. We find that the interest rate of the common pool and the magnitude of memory have crucial effects on the average welfare of the population. The appropriate sense of individuals’ innovation also substantially influences the equilibrium strategies distribution in the long run.