The effect of wealth-based anti-expectation behaviors on public cooperation

Wealth difference is a common sense in our society. It is unreasonable to assume people have the same capability to donate money to the common pool in public goods game (PGG). Individuals have behavioral expectation towards their neighbors. In this paper, we introduce wealth-based anti-expectation mechanism to explore cooperation. Through numerical simulation results, we are glad to find that the anti-expectation mechanism could stimulate cooperation when the positive effects are equal to or larger than the negative effects from anti-expectation behaviors. Based on this mechanism, we propose propagation mechanism which aims to propagate the positive effects from the poor to inspire more people to choose cooperative strategies. When individuals are tolerant towards defectors, The fraction of cooperators increases with the increment of propagation distance. Enlarging the distance is not wise when individuals are harsh towards defectors. Additionally, we find that the more tolerant towards defectors we are, the higher the cooperation rate is in general. Therefore in PGG, we could consider one's anti-expectation towards others' behaviors and improve cooperation by propagating the poor's anti-expectation effects.