Impact of resource-based conditional interaction on cooperation in spatial social dilemmas

Abstract

Due to the contradiction between the finiteness of resources and people’s infinite demand for them, we cannot deny the impact of the limited resources on human behavior. To this end, we construct a novel resource-based conditional interaction model from a tiny perspective, in which not only can limited resources be redistributed among the population, but resources owned by players also affect whether they can interact with each other or not. To be specific, a player who successfully imitates his neighbor’s strategy will have to pay ɛ proportion of his resources to the opponent as the learning cost. In addition, if and only if the resource difference between the focal player x and one of his neighbors y is within an acceptable tolerance interval τ, they will indisputably interact with each other. We mainly resort to the prisoner’s dilemma game and asynchronous strategy update to verify the effectiveness of the model. By resorting to extensive Monte Carlo simulations, we find that there exists an optimal acceptable tolerance interval τ, varying with the value of cost-to-benefit ratio u, to make the promotion of cooperation the most obvious. We also confirm that players’ irrational behavior can be influenced by this resource-based partner selection. However, if we introduce one kind of minimal resource protection mechanism into our proposed model, the level of cooperation cannot be further elevated, or even be hindered when compared with the case without the minimal resource protection mechanism. In the end, we further verify the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed model through other social dilemmas, network topologies, and synchronous strategy update pattern. To a certain extent, we wish that our efforts can wipe out some barriers for researching the evolution of cooperation within the selfish population.