A win-switch-lose-stay strategy promotes cooperation in the evolutionary games

Abstract

The subject of how and why cooperation emerges in real world has been intensively investigated. A number of mechanisms have been found to favor cooperation in ecological systems and human societies. Here, we propose a win-switch-lose-stay strategy whose core lies in two aspects: (i) An individual, according to Fermi updating rule, first selects one neighbor stochastically from all its nearest neighbors to play the game to update its strategy of the first round, and memories the selected neighbor. (ii) The individual interacts with the selected neighbor in the last round if its accumulated payoff is lower than that of the selected neighbor, otherwise the selected neighbor randomly switches to another of its rest neighbors. Other individuals also follow the updating rule and repeat this evolutionary process. Simulation results reveal that the proposed strategy can remarkably promote cooperation in several social dilemmas, including the prisoner’s dilemma, the snowdrift game and the stag-hunt game.