An evolutionary game with conformists and profiteers regarding the memory mechanism

Abstract

Network evolutionary game theory provides a new perspective on how cooperative behaviors emerge in the real world and has been widely investigated. However, most studies assume that players are profiteers and ignore the existence of conformists and that players have memories, which are crucial when people make decisions. In this study, we study a memory-based snowdrift game occurring on networks and propose two strategy-updating rules based on profiteers and conformists while considering the historical strategy, memory strength, payoff information and memory length to discuss the emergence and maintenance of cooperation behaviors. In contrast to previous studies, we introduce the player’s degree of cooperation to continuousize player payoffs and we consider it when defining the player’s strategy-updating rules. In simulations, we show the evolution of the frequency of cooperation as time progresses and investigate the effects of the payoff parameter, memory strength, memory length and conformist ratio on the frequency of cooperation, and further validate the robustness of our model using different network sizes. Our results show that the memory strength, memory length, and conformist ratio can facilitate the cooperation level of the network over a large parameter area, and that the size of the network has almost no effect on the model, which shows the robustness of our model. Our work may elucidate the study of evolutionary games with conformists and memory effects.