Boyu ZHANG is a Professor and Doctoral supervisor in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Beijing Normal University, and is the head of Behavioral and Game Decision Lab. His research interests include evolutionary game and learning theory, mechanism design, network game, and behavioral economics. He has published over 40 research papers in journals, including PNAS, One Earth, Operations Research, Games and Economic Behavior, Experimental Economics, and his publications have been reported by Nature and PNAS. He is serving as the editorial board members of Dynamic Games and Applications, Scientific Reports, and PLoS ONE.

Inequality is ubiquitous in humans and other animal species. Individuals frequently differ in their endowments, productivities, their shares of rewards, and the positions they occupy in social hierarchies. In this talk, we discuss the effects of inequality on cooperation and coordination based on asymmetric threshold public goods games. In general, such games including a free-riding equilibrium in which no one contributes and a set of cooperative equilibria in which the total contribution equals to the threshold. We use a behavioral experiment to study three different scenarios: full equality, endowment inequality, and productivity inequality. For the given parameters, experiments find that endowment inequality is more of an obstacle to cooperation than productivity inequality. Interestingly, in successful groups, different subjects tend to make similar relative contributions (irrespective of their absolute endowments or their productivities). These results highlight some of the nontrivial effects that arise when heterogeneous populations aim to reach a consensus.