Modelling the coevolution of opinion dynamics and decision making in social dilemmas
2026-04-10 • Social and Information Networks
Social and Information Networks
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created a math model to study how people's actions and opinions change together when faced with a situation where they can either cooperate or not, like sharing in a group project. Each person plays a game deciding whether to cooperate or defect and has an opinion on which choice is better. The model combines a public goods game with an opinion-changing process, and people update their decisions step-by-step trying to get the best result for themselves. The authors explore when everyone ends up cooperating or defecting, and they find conditions for these outcomes and situations where everyone might converge to defecting.
Public Goods GameSocial DilemmaCoevolutionary GameFriedkin–Johnsen ModelOpinion DynamicsBest-Response DynamicsEquilibrium AnalysisCooperationDefectionConsensus
Authors
Ella C. Davidson, Lorenzo Zino, Ming Cao, Mengbin Ye
Abstract
This paper proposes a mathematical model for the coevolution of actions and opinions for a population facing a social dilemma. In particular, we assume each person participates in a Public Goods Game (PGG), with their action being to cooperate or defect, and holds an opinion about which action they prefer. We propose a payoff function that combines the PGG with the Friedkin--Johnsen model from opinion dynamics to form a coevolutionary game. According to a discrete-time process, players asynchronously update their actions and opinions, aiming to maximise their individual payoff for the coevolutionary game using myopic best-response. We study the equilibria and provide conditions for the existence of the all-defection and all-cooperation consensus equilibria. We also establish conditions for global convergence to the all-defection equilibrium.