Inequality-induced emotions might promote cooperation in evolutionary games

Jiawei Wang, Liming Zhang (), Haihong Li, Qionglin Dai () and Junzhong Yang
Additional contact information
Jiawei Wang: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Liming Zhang: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Haihong Li: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Qionglin Dai: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Junzhong Yang: Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 2023, vol. 96, issue 3, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Two types of emotions, envy and guilt, could be induced when people encounter inequality; especially, persons who are disadvantaged may feel envy toward the ones at advantage, whereas those in superior positions may feel guilty. These two emotions can affect subjective evaluations of their own utilities. In most previous studies of evolutionary games, the payoffs gained from games are directly used for payoff comparison when individuals consider to imitate others’ strategies, regardless of the impacts caused by the inner emotions. Here, we introduce two types of inequality aversion in evolutionary games and assume that the inequality aversion can induce two different emotions and subsequently affect the utilities of individuals. We investigate how the inequality aversion affects the evolution of cooperation in spatial evolutionary games. The numerical simulation results show that envy makes the evolution of cooperation more difficult, while guilt can effectively promote cooperation. Moreover, we have provided some intuitive explanations by scrutinizing the microscopic evolutions of the strategy patterns for different types of players, which are categorized according to strategy and emotion. We find that, to cooperators and defectors, the two emotions have different influences on strategy transmission in different evolution stages, respectively. Roughly speaking, envy hinders cooperation by weakening cooperators, while guilt promotes cooperation by weakening defectors. Besides, we also study the effects of inequality aversion on payoff distribution and find that envy influences fairness negatively, whereas guilt plays a positive role in fairness. Graphic abstract

Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1140/epjb/s10051-023-00508-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:eurphb:v:96:y:2023:i:3:d:10.1140_epjb_s10051-023-00508-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10051

DOI: 10.1140/epjb/s10051-023-00508-z

Access Statistics for this article

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems is currently edited by P. Hänggi and Angel Rubio

More articles in The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems from Springer, EDP Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().