Performance appraisal promotes cooperation in spatial public goods games

Abstract

In real organizations, performance appraisal serves as an important means of evaluating employees' work outcomes and behaviors, while performance pay directly links compensation to the evaluation results. However, in traditional spatial public goods games, the total payoff of a group is equally distributed among all participants without considering individual differences in contributions, an approach that ignores the heterogeneity of individual efforts. To overcome this limitation, we propose a spatial public goods game model based on performance appraisal, in which individual payoffs are divided into two parts: an equally distributed component and a performance-weighted component. Specifically, each individual receives scores from its neighboring groups, and the individual's reputation is dynamically updated by accumulating these scores, which further modulates the fitness function during strategy imitation. Extensive numerical simulation results demonstrate that the performance appraisal mechanism significantly promotes the emergence of cooperative behavior. The reputation reinforcement mechanism amplifies this positive effect by creating fitness advantages for high-reputation individuals. These findings suggest that incorporating performance appraisal into payoff allocation helps mitigate social dilemmas and promote collective cooperation.