Reputation in a public goods game: Taking the design of credit bureaus to the lab

Individual choice and reputation distribution of cooperative behaviors among heterogeneous groups

“…Nevertheless, observation is not enough for us to evaluate or measure their effects, so we resort to statistical methods. Statistical models [7,11,19,[28][29][30]32] have been used to do this in related fields. Both the mean and standard deviation of reputation are investigated as the explained variables, and b, p 1 , p 3 , and other associated variables are utilized as explained factors or variables to shape values of the mean and standard deviation.…”

“…R u = 55.99(b − 1.97) 2 − 48.42p 1 + 18.10p 3 − 20.71 (7) For the mean or overall level of reputation, there exist three influential factors whose coefficients are statistically significant: the temptation indicates quadratic effect on the level of reputation, and it reduces reputation within its whole range, but reputation decelerates as temptation grows; the ratio of elites plays a negative role in promotion of individual reputation, and agents tend to defect as there are more and more elites; oppositely, the ratio of scoundrels enhances individual reputation greatly, as they are likely to cooperate as more and more scoundrels exist. R sd = −11.2(b − 1.98) 2 − 60.7(p 1 − 0.13) 2 − 17.1(r − 1) 2 + 11.8 · p 3 + 22.6 (8) The diversity of individual choice is more complicated than the mean, as we verified that, besides of existing three factors, one more factor has significant effect on reputation and more quadratic relationships have been found: Reputation still has quadratic effect on diversity, but it enlarges the diversity, accelerating as temptation grows; the quadratic effect of elites' ratio or percentage is found with a threshold of 0.126.…”

“…Researchers in related fields including spatial game theory [4][5][6] have proposed many solutions or counter-temptation mechanisms [3,[7][8][9] to overcome temptation and promote cooperation. Spatial prisoners' dilemma games [5,6,9,10] and * Tel.…”

“…E-mail address: lvpeng.tsinghua@hotmail.com public goods games [7, are widely applied to achieve this goal. They have raised serials of anti-temptation mechanisms or solutions, such as influence [28], recommendation [25], tolerance [32], expectation [10,34], punishment [21,29,32,35], reciprocity [35][36][37][38][39], networks [40][41][42][43][44][45][46], structured population [47][48][49][50], multiplex network [51][52][53] and volunteering [54][55][56][57], etc.…”

“…Among them, reputation is an important solution that efficiently countervails temptation [3,5,7,8,12,24]. Reputation records agents' history of cooperation or defection, so that each individuals or agents are able to identify, cooperate with, or imitate the neighbor with highest reputation [2,3,5].…”