Evidence map›Paper›PMID 36722070›Full record

ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2023

Optimization of institutional incentives for cooperation in structured populations.

Shengxian Wang, Xiaojie Chen, Zhilong Xiao, Attila Szolnoki, Vítor V Vasconcelos

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
9citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

9 citing papers in PubMed.

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  5. Revisiting institutional punishment in the N-person prisoner's dilemma.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2025
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors.

Shengxian WangSchool of Mathematical Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, People's Republic of China.ORCID 0000-0002-7094-511X
Xiaojie ChenSchool of Mathematical Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, People's Republic of China.ORCID 0000-0002-9129-2197
Zhilong XiaoSchool of Mathematical Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, People's Republic of China.
Attila SzolnokiInstitute of Technical Physics and Materials Science, Centre for Energy Research, P.O. Box 49, Budapest 1525, Hungary.ORCID 0000-0002-0907-0406
Vítor V VasconcelosComputational Science Lab, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1098XH, The Netherlands.ORCID 0000-0002-4621-5272

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

The application of incentives, such as reward and punishment, is a frequently applied way for promoting cooperation among interacting individuals in structured populations. However, how to properly use the incentives is still a challenging problem for incentive-providing institutions. In particular, since the implementation of incentive is costly, to explore the optimal incentive protocol, which ensures the desired collective goal at a minimal cost, is worthy of study. In this work, we consider the positive and negative incentives for a structured population of individuals whose conflicting interactions are characterized by a Prisoner's Dilemma game. We establish an index function for quantifying the cumulative cost during the process of incentive implementation, and theoretically derive the optimal positive and negative incentive protocols for cooperation on regular networks. We find that both types of optimal incentive protocols are identical and time-invariant. Moreover, we compare the optimal rewarding and punishing schemes concerning implementation cost and provide a rigorous basis for the usage of incentives in the game-theoretical framework. We further perform computer simulations to support our theoretical results and explore their robustness for different types of population structures, including regular, random, small-world and scale-free networks.

Indexed as

MotivationPunishmentComputer SimulationHumanscooperationevolutionary game theoryinstitutional incentivesPrisoner’s Dilemma gamestructured populations

Identifiers

PMID36722070
PMCPMC9890111

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.