How do the joint effects of aspiration and social influence promote cooperation in the prisoner’s dilemma game?

Abstract

Various mechanisms have been proposed to promote cooperation in evolutionary games, including aspiration and social influence. However, the joint effects of aspiration and social influence have so far been ignored in the literature. Thus, we discuss the joint effects of aspiration and social influence on promoting cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG). We introduce different aspiration tags as different aspirations and different types of neighborhoods as different social influences to reveal how the level of cooperation changes in four heterogeneous micro-environments composed of diverse aspirations and social influences. The Fermi function is adopted as the priority strategy updating rule. Simulation results show that aspiration and social influence mechanisms are jointly effective at improving cooperation in the PDG. More precisely, the aspiration mechanism promotes cooperation unconditionally, but that the social influence mechanism promotes it conditionally.