Donation Networks in Underprivileged Communities

Individuals who have very low income and belong to an underprivileged community have a challenging task when managing their financial life, typically due to negative unpredictable events and lack of health and financial services. Cooperation strategies based on savings and credits are becoming a very important option for these communities to address such challenges and to have some level of financial stability. Since designing new cooperation strategies takes a significant amount of time and effort, computational tools have been recently introduced to simulate and evaluate communities that implement these financial cooperation schemes. In this article, based on the theory that underlies these computational tools and theoretical concepts of cooperation, we propose a new cooperation strategy based on donations that are distributed between the members of the community according to the given network topology. Through mathematical and simulation analyses, we show the scenarios where the proposed cooperation strategy, based on altruistic behavior, can potentially improve the resiliency of the community to negative unpredictable events.