Personalised strategy of allocating social goods in structured populations

Abstract

Cooperation underlies many aspects of the evolution of human and animal societies, where cooperators produce social goods to benefit others. Explaining the emergence of cooperation among selfish individuals has become a major research interest in evolutionary dynamics. Previous studies typically use complex networks to capture the interactions between individuals, and assume that cooperators distribute benefits equally to their neighbors. In practice, the distribution of social goods is often non-uniform, and individuals may selectively provide benefits to those they interact with based on their personal preferences. Here, we develop an efficient algorithm to optimize the placement of donation structure in any given network to minimize the threshold for the emergence of cooperation. We find when cooperators allocate the benefits preferentially compared to the traditional settings of donating to all neighbors, cooperation tends to be maximally promoted. Furthermore, the optimal donation structure is strongly disassortative -- the low-degree nodes tend to donate to high-degree ones preferentially and vice versa. Based on this finding, we offer a local heuristic strategy based on degree thresholds for personalizing the allocation of social goods and choosing each cooperator's recipient, which we use to prove its effectiveness in empirical datasets. Our findings advance the understanding of mechanisms for promoting cooperation with strategic allocations of social goods.