Environmental feedback mechanism coupling reputation and node entropy in spatial public goods games

Hongwei Kang, Chengzhi Feng, Yong Shen, Xingping Sun, Qingyi Chen and Lingye Zeng

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2026, vol. 209, issue P1

Abstract: Cooperation in public goods games is strongly affected by the interaction between individual behavior, social evaluation, and the surrounding payoff environment. To capture this interplay, this study develops a spatial public goods game model with an endogenous environmental feedback mechanism jointly regulated by reputation and node entropy. In the proposed framework, reputation serves as a dynamic measure of social evaluation shaped by individual behavior, while node entropy is introduced to characterize the strength of local behavioral inclination and the heterogeneity of the surrounding interaction environment. Based on weighted local reputation and weighted local node entropy, the synergy factor is no longer treated as a fixed parameter, but adaptively adjusted through a feedback rule, allowing the payoff environment to evolve with local social conditions. In addition, strategy updating incorporates both payoff comparison and reputation comparison, thereby reflecting a decision process influenced by material incentives as well as social information. Through this construction, the model establishes a closed coevolutionary loop among strategy, reputation, node entropy, and environmental feedback. The results show that endogenous environmental feedback can create favorable conditions for the persistence of cooperation, while its effectiveness depends on the updating mechanism and the structure of the baseline reputation distribution. The proposed model provides a new perspective for understanding how social evaluation, local heterogeneity, and adaptive environments jointly shape the evolution of cooperation in spatial social dilemmas.

Keywords: Spatial public goods game; Evolution of cooperation; Reputation mechanism; Node entropy; Environmental feedback (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077926006132
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:209:y:2026:i:p1:s0960077926006132

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2026.118472

Access Statistics for this article

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is currently edited by Stefano Boccaletti and Stelios Bekiros

More articles in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thayer, Thomas R. ().