Cooperation in the spatial public goods game with the second-order reputation evaluation

The existence of reputation can significantly promote the level of cooperation within the human population. In the recent years, most of the researches were based on binary image score or first-order evaluation standard. In this paper, we propose a second-order reputation evaluation model, in which the individual's image score will change not only in accordance with his own strategy, but also the reputation value of neighbors. Individuals try to enhance their reputation to cooperate with the surrounding high-reputation individuals, and then becomes an influential individual in the population. The existence of this mechanism renders the individuals who at the edge of the clusters formed by the cooperators to rapidly accumulate their reputation values through the adoption of cooperative strategy, and then the cooperative strategy can be spread widely and rapidly in the whole population. Through extensive numerical simulations, it is clearly indicated that the population cooperation behavior will be obviously improved when the individual's influence factor becomes smaller or the reputation step length increases. The current results are further conducive to understanding the emergence of cooperation in many real world systems.