Reputation-gated funding sustains cooperation: A spatial production game with selective investment

In many labor-production environments, emerging projects rarely receive immediate capital support. Capital is allocated only after clients, investors, or managers evaluate whether a local team appears reliable enough to merit funding. To examine this pre-production screening process, we introduce a coupled employee–investor spatial production game with a partially occupied investor layer. A potential investor is activated only when the average reputation of the four neighboring employees exceeds a prescribed threshold. Once investment is activated, employees decide whether to cooperate by paying labor costs or to shirk. We derive local benchmark conditions for investor profitability, employee incentives, and project-level welfare and use them to interpret Monte Carlo simulations. The results show that investor density and dividend share generate distinct tensions. Denser investors enlarge economic activity but may increase the repeated labor burden borne by cooperators. Larger dividend shares improve investor returns only up to a point, because excessive extraction weakens employee incentives and eventually reduces cooperation and welfare. The reputation threshold acts as a coordination variable. A properly calibrated threshold can turn local reputation from a passive behavioral record into an informative gate for capital allocation. Productivity scans, baseline comparisons, and parameter-space heatmaps show that the advantage of the reputation-gated rule comes not merely from reducing investment frequency, but from directing investment toward neighborhoods with a cooperative history. These findings place reputation-gated funding within feedback mechanisms for cooperation, while highlighting pre-production opportunity allocation in spatially structured systems.