Role of memory effect in the evolution of cooperation based on spatial prisoner's dilemma game

We investigate the impact of memory effect on the evolution of cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game, in which each player will record his own strategies during the previous M game rounds (here, M is also named as the memory length). At each time step, each individual will update his current strategy according to the Fermi-like probability which will be multiplied by a pre-factor, and this factor will be correlated with the fraction of previous strategy states identical with the individual strategy to be updated. The numerical simulation results demonstrate that the memory length will largely influence the cooperation level at the stationary state, and it is clearly shown that the intermediate value of M will optimally favor the emergence of cooperation and the dynamical evolution, and characteristic patterns also support these conclusions. In addition, we depict the full cooperation phase diagrams and find that the cooperation region will be broadened under the case of moderate M values. The current results also indicate that the limited memory may be enough for us to design the effective promotion mechanism and further understand the emergency of cooperation taking place upon many networked populations.     

零行列式策略在雪堆博弈中的演化

零行列式策略不仅可以单方面设置对手收益,而且可以对双方的收益施加一个线性关系,从而达到敲诈对手的目的.本文针对零行列式策略博弈前期与稳态期的收益存在偏差,基于Markov链理论给出零行列式策略与全合作策略博弈的瞬态分布、瞬态收益及达到稳态所需时间.发现在小的敲诈因子下,敲诈者前期收益高于稳态期收益,敲诈因子较大时,情况截然相反,并且敲诈因子越大,越不利于双方合作,达到稳态也越慢.这为现实生活中频繁更新策略的博弈提供了一种计算实时收益的方法.此外针对敲诈策略与进化人的博弈,论证了双方均背叛状态下,进化人下次博弈时一定进化为全合作策略.通过对所有状态下策略更新过程仿真,发现进化人在四种情况下的进化速度有显著差异,并最终演化为全合作策略,表明零行列式策略是合作产生的催化剂.     

Integrating the environmental factor into the strategy updating rule to promote cooperation in evolutionary games

Many previous studies have shown that the environment plays an important role for social individuals. In this paper, we integrate the environmental factor, which is defined as the average payoff of all a player's neighbours, with the standard Fermi updating rule by introducing a tunable parameter, ω. It is found that the level of cooperation increases remarkably, and that the cooperators can better resist the invasion of defection with an increase in ω. This interesting phenomenon is then explained from a microscopic view. In addition, the universality of this mechanism is also proved with the help of the small-world network and the random regular graph. This work may be helpful in understanding cooperation behaviour in species from unicellular organisms up to human beings.     

Evolution of cooperation in the spatial public goods game with the third-order reputation evaluation

In this letter, in order to deeply explore the role of individual reputation in the evolutionary game dynamics, we present a new third-order reputation evaluation model to discuss the evolution of cooperation in the spatial public goods game. In the current model, we should not only consider the strategy (cooperation, C or defection, D) of a focal player, but also take his own reputation and his opponent's reputation status into account. Among them, the individual reputation will be divided into being good and bad according to the specified threshold, and the good player will be endowed with the more influential strategy transfer ability, which further helps to create the clusters of cooperative and good players within the population and then fosters the cooperation. A large plethora of experimental simulation results indicate that four rules under the third-order reputation mechanism can lead to the promotion of cooperation when compared to the traditional public goods game model. The current work is conductive to a better understanding of the persistence and emergence of collective cooperation in real-world systems.     

Adjusting learning motivation to promote cooperation

An evolutionary prisoner’s dilemma game with players adjusting their learning motivation is studied. At each time step, each player can adjust his/her learning motivation according to the difference between the current payoff and payoff aspiration. Greater payoff aspiration means stronger learning motivation, and vice versa. We find that the density of cooperation in a spatial prisoner’s dilemma game is enhanced when the learning motivation mechanism is considered. Meanwhile, we show that proper noise can not only induce the highest cooperation level but also can maintain the cooperation phenomenon even though there is more temptation to defect.     

Fitness of others' evaluation effect promotes cooperation in spatial public goods game

Payoff-driven strategy updating rule has always been adopted as a classic mechanism, but up to now, there have been a great many of researches on considering other forms of strategy updating rules, among which pursuing high fitness is one of the most direct and conventional motivations in the decision-making using game theory. But there are few or no researches on fitness from the perspective of others' evaluation. In view of this, we propose a new model in which the evaluation effect with fitness-driven strategy updating rule is taken into consideration, and introduce an evaluation coefficient to present the degree of others' evaluation on individual's behavior. The cooperative individuals can get positive evaluation, otherwise defective individuals get negative evaluation, and the degree of evaluation is related to the number of neighbors who have the same strategy of individual. Through numerical simulation, we find that the evaluation effect of others can enhance the network reciprocity, thus promoting the cooperation. For a strong dilemma, the higher evaluation coefficient can greatly weaken the cooperation dilemma; for a weak one, the higher evaluation coefficient can make cooperator clusters spread faster, however, there is no significant difference in the level of cooperation in the final stable state among different evaluation coefficients. The cooperation becomes more flourish as the number of fitness-driven individuals increases, when all individuals adopt fitness-driven strategy updating rule, the cooperators can quickly occupy the whole population. Besides, we demonstrate the robustness of the results on the WS small-world network, ER random network, and BA scale-free network.     

Impacts of memory on a regular lattice for different population sizes with asynchronous update in spatial snowdrift game

Memory is an important factor on the evolution of cooperation in spatial structure. For evolutionary biologists, the problem is often how cooperation acts can emerge in an evolving system. In the case of snowdrift game, it is found that memory can boost cooperation level for large cost-to-benefit ratio r, while inhibit cooperation for small r. Thus, how to enlarge the range of r for the purpose of enhancing cooperation becomes a hot issue recently. This paper addresses a new memory-based approach and its core lies in: Each agent applies the given rule to compare its own historical payoffs in a certain memory size, and take the obtained maximal one as virtual payoff. In order to get the optimal strategy, each agent randomly selects one of its neighbours to compare their virtual payoffs, which can lead to the optimal strategy. Both constant-size memory and size-varying memory are investigated by means of a scenario of asynchronous updating algorithm on regular lattices with different sizes. Simulation results show that this approach effectively enhances cooperation level in spatial structure and makes the high cooperation level simultaneously emerge for both small and large r. Moreover, it is discovered that population sizes have a significant influence on the effects of cooperation.     

Effects of aspiration on public cooperation in structured populations

We introduce a deterministic win-stay-lose-shift rule into the spatial public goods game, according to which a player will change its current strategy only if its payoff is below a predefined aspiration level. Simulation results on the square lattice and scale-free network indicate that the aspiration level greatly affects the evolution of cooperation. For small multiplication factors, the frequency of cooperation increases to 0.5 as the aspiration level increases. For large multiplication factors, intermediate levels of aspiration prove optimal for the successful evolution of public cooperation. Some qualitative analyses are provided to explain the above results. Besides, we have found that there exists a ping-pong vibration of cooperation at some specific values of multiplication factors and aspiration levels.     

The evolution of cooperation within the multigame environment based on the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm

This paper studies the evolution of cooperation in a so-called multigame environment based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. In a multigame environment, players use different game payoff matrices and acquire their utilities from their interactions with their neighbors. According to the PSO algorithm, each player updates its strategy according to both the strategy adopted by the player with the highest utility in its neighborhood and the most profitable strategy in their own past actions. Simulation results show that the multigame environment is conducive to the promotion of cooperation. Besides, within the multigame environment, for any player, imitating the most profitable strategy in its past actions promotes cooperation more effectively than imitating the strategy adopted by the player with the highest utility in its neighborhood.     

Stability of strategies in payoff-driven evolutionary games on networks

We consider a network of coupled agents playing the Prisoner's Dilemma game, in which players are allowed to pick a strategy in the interval [0, 1], with 0 corresponding to defection, 1 to cooperation, and intermediate values representing mixed strategies in which each player may act as a cooperator or a defector over a large number of interactions with a certain probability. Our model is payoff-driven, i.e., we assume that the level of accumulated payoff at each node is a relevant parameter in the selection of strategies. Also, we consider that each player chooses his∕her strategy in a context of limited information. We present a deterministic nonlinear model for the evolution of strategies. We show that the final strategies depend on the network structure and on the choice of the parameters of the game. We find that polarized strategies (pure cooperator∕defector states) typically emerge when (i) the network connections are sparse, (ii) the network degree distribution is heterogeneous, (iii) the network is assortative, and surprisingly, (iv) the benefit of cooperation is high.     

Behavior of Collective Cooperation Yielded by Two Update Rules in Social Dilemmas:Combining Fermi and Moran Rules

We combine the Fermi and Moran update rules in the spatial prisoner's dilemma and snowdrift games to investigate the behavior of collective cooperation among agents on the regular lattice.Large-scale simulations indicate that,compared to the model with only one update rule,the cooperation behavior exhibits the richer phenomena,and the role of update dynamics should be paid more attention in the evolutionary game theory.Meanwhile,we also observe that the introduction of Moran rule,which needs to consider all neighbor's information,can markedly promote the aggregate cooperation level,that is,randomly selecting the neighbor proportional to its payoff to imitate will facilitate the cooperation among agents.Current results will contribute to further understand the cooperation dynamics and evolutionary behaviors within many biological,economic and social systems.     

Evolution of donations on scale-free networks during a COVID-19 breakout

Having a large number of timely donations during the early stages of a COVID-19 breakout would normally be considered rare. Donation is a special public goods game with zero yield for donors, and it has the characteristics of the prisoners' dilemma. This paper discusses why timely donations in the early stages of COVID-19 occurred. Based on the idea that donation is a strategy adopted by players during interconnection on account of their understanding of the environment, donation-related populations are placed on social networks and the inter-correlation structures in the population are described by scale-free networks. Players in donation-related populations are of four types: donors, illegal beneficiaries, legal beneficiaries, and inactive people. We model the evolutionary game of donation on a scale-free network. Donors, illegal beneficiaries and inactive people learn and update strategies under the Fermi update rule, whereas the conversion between legal beneficiaries and the other three types is determined by the environment surrounding the players. We study the evolution of cooperative action when the agglomeration coefficient, the parameters of the utility function, the noise intensity, the utility coefficient, the donation coefficient and the initial states of the population on the scale-free network change. For population sizes of 50, 100, 150, and 200, we give the utility functions and the agglomeration coefficients for promoting cooperation and study the corresponding steady states and structural characteristics of the population. We identify the best ranges of the noise intensity K, the donation coefficient α and the utility coefficient β for promoting cooperation at different population sizes. Furthermore, with the increase of the population size, the donor traps are found. At the same time, it is discovered that the initial states of the population have a great impact on the steady states; thus the upper and lower triangle phenomena are proposed. We also find that the population size itself is also an important factor for promoting donation, pointing out the direction of efforts to further promote donation and achieve better social homeostasis under the donation model.     

Behavior of Collective Cooperation Yielded by Two Update Rules in Social Dilemmas: Combining Fermi and Moran Rules

We combine the Fermi and Moran update rules in the spatial prisoner's dilemma and snowdrift games to investigate the behavior of collective cooperation among agents on the regular lattice. Large-scale simulations indicate that, compared to the model with only one update rule, the cooperation behavior exhibits the richer phenomena, and the role of update dynamics should be paid more attention in the evolutionary game theory. Meanwhile, we also observe that the introduction of Moran rule, which needs to consider all neighbor's information, can markedly promote the aggregate cooperation level, that is, randomly selecting the neighbor proportional to its payoff to imitate will facilitate the cooperation among agents. Current results will contribute to further understand the cooperation dynamics and evolutionary behaviors within many biological, economic and social systems.     

Sub-strategy updating evolution in minority game

In this paper, we propose and study a new evolution model of minority game. Any strategy in minority game can be regarded as composed of sub-strategies corresponding to different histories. Based on the evolution model proposed by Li－Riolo－Savit, in which those agents that perform poorly may update their strategies randomly. This paper presents a new evolution model in which poor agents update their strategies by changing only a part of sub-strategy sets with low success rate. Simulation result shows that the new model with sub-strategy-set updating evolution mechanism may approach its steady state more quickly than the Li－Riolo－Savit model. In the steady state of the new model, stronger adaptive cooperation among agents will appear, implying that the social resource can be allocated more rationally and utilized more effectively compared with the Li－Riolo－Savit model.     

Spatially correlated heterogeneous aspirations to enhance network reciprocity

Perc & Wang demonstrated that aspiring to be the fittest under conditions of pairwise strategy updating enhances network reciprocity in structured populations playing 2×2 Prisoner’s Dilemma games (Z. Wang, M. Perc, Aspiring to the fittest and promoted of cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, Physical Review E 82 (2010) 021115; M. Perc, Z. Wang, Heterogeneous aspiration promotes cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, PLOS one 5 (12) (2010) e15117). Through numerical simulations, this paper shows that network reciprocity is even greater if heterogeneous aspirations are imposed. We also suggest why heterogeneous aspiration fosters network reciprocity. It distributes strategy updating speed among agents in a manner that fortifies the initially allocated cooperators’ clusters against invasion. This finding prompted us to further enhance the usual heterogeneous aspiration cases for heterogeneous network topologies. We find that a negative correlation between degree and aspiration level does extend cooperation among heterogeneously structured agents.     

The effect of asymmetric payoff mechanism on evolutionary networked prisoner’s dilemma game

In social and biological systems, there are obvious individual divergence and asymmetric payoff phenomenon due to the strength, power and influence differences. In this paper, we introduce an asymmetric payoff mechanism to evolutionary Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG) on scale-free networks. The co-effects of individual diversity and asymmetric payoff mechanism on the evolution of cooperation and the wealth distribution under different updating rules are investigated. Numerical results show that the cooperation is highly promoted when the hub nodes are favored in the payoff matrix, which seems to harm the interest of the majority. But the inequality of social wealth distribution grows with the unbalanced payoff rule. However, when the node difference is eliminated in the learning strategy, the asymmetric payoff rule will not affect the cooperation level. Our work may sharpen the understanding of the cooperative behavior and wealth inequality in the society.     

Continuous spatial public goods game with self and peer punishment based on particle swarm optimization

How cooperative behavior emerges and evolves in human society remains a puzzle. It has been observed that the sense of guilt rooted from free-riding and the sense of justice for punishing the free-riders are prevalent in the real world. Inspired by this observation, two punishment mechanisms have been introduced in the spatial public goods game which are called self-punishment and peer punishment respectively in this paper. In each situation, we have introduced a corresponding parameter to describe the level of individual tolerance or social tolerance. For each individual, whether to punish others or whether it will be punished by others depends on the corresponding tolerance parameter. We focus on the effects of the two kinds of tolerance parameters on the cooperation of the population. The particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based learning rule is used to describe the strategy updating process of individuals. We consider both of the memory and the imitation in our model. Via simulation experiments, we find that both of the two punishment mechanisms could facilitate the promotion of cooperation to a large extent. For the self-punishment and for most parameters in the peer punishment, the smaller the tolerance parameter, the more conducive it is to promote cooperation. These results can help us to better understand the prevailing phenomenon of cooperation in the real world.     

Reputational preference and other-regarding preference based rewarding mechanism promotes cooperation in spatial social dilemmas

To study the incentive mechanisms of cooperation, we propose a preference rewarding mechanism in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game, which simultaneously considers reputational preference, other-regarding preference and the dynamic adjustment of vertex weight. The vertex weight of a player is adaptively adjusted according to the comparison result of his own reputation and the average reputation value of his immediate neighbors. Players are inclined to pay a personal cost to reward the cooperative neighbor with the greatest vertex weight. The vertex weight of a player is proportional to the preference rewards he can obtain from direct neighbors. We find that the preference rewarding mechanism significantly facilitates the evolution of cooperation, and the dynamic adjustment of vertex weight has powerful effect on the emergence of cooperative behavior. To validate multiple effects, strategy distribution and the average payoff and fitness of players are discussed in a microcosmic view.     

Evacuation of pedestrians from a hall by game strategy update

In this paper, a cellular automaton model considering game strategy update is proposed to study the pedestrian evacuation in a hall. Pedestrians are classified into two categories, i.e., cooperators and defectors, and they walk to an exit according to their own strategy change. The conflicts that two or three pedestrians try to occupy the same site at the same time are investigated in the Game theory model. Based on it, the relationship between the pedestrian flow rate and the evacuation time as well as the variation of cooperative proportion against evacuation time is investigated from the different initial cooperative proportions under the influence of noise. The critical value of the noise is found when there is a small number of defectors in the initial time. Moreover, the influences of the initial cooperative proportion and strength of noise on evacuation are discussed. The results show that the lower the initial cooperative proportion as well as the bigger the strength of noise, the longer the time it takes for evacuation.     

Effects of Inertia on Evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma Game

Considering the inertia of individuals in real life,we propose a modified Fermi updating rule,where the inertia of players is introduced into evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game(PDG) on square lattices.We mainly focus on how the inertia affects the cooperative behavior of the system.Interestingly,we find that the cooperation level has a nonmonotonic dependence on the inertia:with small inertia,cooperators will soon be invaded by defectors;with large inertia,players are unwilling to change their strategies and the cooperation level remains the same as the initial state;while a moderate inertia can induce the highest cooperation level.Moreover,effects of environmental noise and individual inertia are studied.Our work may be helpful in understanding the emergence and persistence of cooperation in nature and society.