Rationality, Imitation, and Rational Imitation in Spatial Public Goods Games

In both economic and evolutionary theories of games, two general classes evolution can be identified: 1) dynamics based on myopic optimization 2) imitations or replications. The collective behavior structured populations governed by these vary significantly. Particularly in social dilemmas, optimizations typically lead to Nash equilibrium payoffs that are well below the optimum, e.g., the tragedy commons , whereas hinder equilibration while allowing higher cooperation levels payoffs. Motivated behavioral studies, this article, we investigate how benefits combined an intuitive decision rule, xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">rational imitation is mimic successful others only if it earns you a payoff. contrast purely rational (best-response) imitative rules, combination guarantees xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">finite time convergence imitation profile arbitrary networks xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">and facilitate xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">high cooperation for small public goods multipliers.