  Designing mechanisms that leverage cooperation between agents has been a
long-lasting goal in Multiagent Systems. The task is especially challenging
when agents are selfish, lack common goals and face social dilemmas, i.e.,
situations in which individual interest conflicts with social welfare. Past
works explored mechanisms that explain cooperation in biological and social
systems, providing important clues for the aim of designing cooperative
artificial societies. In particular, several works show that cooperation is
able to emerge when specific network structures underlie agents' interactions.
Notwithstanding, social dilemmas in which defection is highly tempting still
pose challenges concerning the effective sustainability of cooperation. Here we
propose a new redistribution mechanism that can be applied in structured
populations of agents. Importantly, we show that, when implemented locally
(i.e., agents share a fraction of their wealth surplus with their nearest
neighbors), redistribution excels in promoting cooperation under regimes where,
before, only defection prevailed.
