Indirect reciprocity in the public goods game with collective reputations

Abstract

Indirect reciprocity unveils how social cooperation is founded upon moral systems. Within the frame of dyadic games based on individual reputations, the 'leading-eight' strategies distinguish themselves in promoting and sustaining cooperation. However, in real-world societies, there are widespread interactions at the group level, where individuals need to make a singular action choice when facing multiple individuals with different reputations. Here, through introducing the assessment of collective reputations, we develop a framework that embeds group-level reputation structure into public goods games to study the evolution of group-level indirect reciprocity. We show that changing the criteria of group assessment destabilizes the reputation dynamics of leading-eight strategies. In a particular range of social assessment criteria, all leading-eight strategies can break the social dilemma in public goods games and sustain cooperation. Specifically, there exists an optimal, moderately set assessment criterion that is most conducive to promoting cooperation. Moreover, in the evolution of assessment criteria, the preference of the leading-eight strategies for social strictness is inversely correlated with the payoff level. Our work reveals the impact of social strictness on prosocial behaviour, highlighting the importance of group-level interactions in the analysis of evolutionary games and complex social dynamics.