Emergence of cooperation in spatial public goods game with conditional participation

Conditional interactions are common in both human and animal societies. To understand the impacts of this feature on the evolution of cooperation, we propose a modified public goods game combined with conditional interactions in terms of the aspiration payoffs. Through simulations, we find that the function of the fraction of cooperators and the synergy factor is non-monotonic. This indicates that a large synergy factor is not always in favor of the promotion of cooperation. In addition, for a high aspiration, the typical coexistence state of cooperators and defectors could disappear, and the system demonstrates a sharp transition from the complete defection state to the complete cooperation state as the synergy factor increases. Furthermore, an interesting critical phenomenon is found in a finite system, i.e., the system can randomly evolve into a complete defection state or a complete cooperation state. An explanation of these evolutionary outcomes is provided in this paper, which is in agreement with the simulation results.