Evolutionary branching of social preferences in a public good provision game

Guillaume Cheikbossian () and Jorge Peña
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Guillaume Cheikbossian: CEE-M - Centre d'Economie de l'Environnement - Montpellier - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement - Institut Agro Montpellier - Institut Agro - Institut national d'enseignement supérieur pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement - UM - Université de Montpellier
Jorge Peña: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - Comue de Toulouse - Communauté d'universités et établissements de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

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Abstract: We study the evolution of other-regarding preferences in a public goods game where the production function exhibits varying degrees of complementarity between individual efforts. Individuals are rational agents who play a Nash equilibrium, but differ in the weight they assign to others' payoffs, capturing varying degrees of prosocial or anti-social preferences. This preference trait evolves through payoff-based biased social learning, modeled within an adaptive dynamics framework. Because material payoffs induced by the equilibrium contributions may be non-concave in the preference parameter, evolutionary branching can arise. We show that monomorphic populations are evolutionarily stable only when complementarity between individual efforts is sufficiently strong, in which case preferences converge toward either prosociality or anti-sociality depending on the nature of strategic interactions between players. By contrast, when contributions are highly substitutable, monomorphic populations can become unstable, giving rise to polymorphic populations in which multiple preference types coexist. These results highlight how the structure of the public goods environment shapes the evolution and diversity of other-regarding motivations in culturally evolving populations.

Keywords: Adaptive dynamics; Other-regarding preferences; Public goods games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04-24
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