Preferential mechanism with expected payoff promotes cooperation in spatial voluntary public goods game

Cooperation plays an important role in the development of human civilization. How to promote the emergence of cooperation has always been a hot research topic. In the evolution game, the players usually has their minimum requirement of income which is called expected payoff. This paper investigates a preferential selection mechanism with an expected payoff to improve the level of cooperation. It is assumed that individuals select the strategies of reference neighbors to play the virtual games. Then, players update their strategies by comparing three types of payoff. In addition, a preferential parameter is introduced to control the player's select preference. The simulations show that appropriate values of expected payoff can improve the level of cooperation regardless of the value of preference parameter, which avoids the extremely low cooperation rate when the preferential parameter is negative in previous studies. Furthermore, the larger multiplication factor can encourage the cooperation rate at a high range, even though the expected payoff is small.