Abstract
In realistic world individuals with high reputation are more likely to influence the collective behaviors. Due to the cost and error of information dissemination, however, it is unreasonable to assign each individual with a complete cognitive power, which means that not everyone can accurately realize others’ reputation situation. Here we introduce the mechanism of inferring reputation into the selection of potential strategy sources to explore the evolution of cooperation. Before the game each player is assigned with a randomly distributed parameter p denoting his ability to infer the reputation of others. The parameter p of each individual is kept constant during the game. The value of p indicates that the neighbor possessing highest reputation is chosen with the probability p and randomly choosing an opponent is left with the probability 1−p. We find that this novel mechanism can be seen as an universally applicable promoter of cooperation, which works on various interaction networks and in different types of evolutionary game. Of particular interest is the fact that, in the early stages of evolutionary process, cooperators with high reputation who are easily regarded as the potential strategy donors can quickly lead to the formation of extremely robust clusters of cooperators that are impervious to defector attacks. These clusters eventually help cooperators reach their undisputed dominance, which transcends what can be warranted by the spatial reciprocity alone. Moreover, we provide complete phase diagrams to depict the impact of uncertainty in strategy adoptions and conclude that the effective interaction topology structure may be altered under such a mechanism. When the estimation of reputation is extended, we also show that the moderate value of evaluation factor enables cooperation to thrive best. We thus present a viable method of understanding the ubiquitous cooperative behaviors in nature and hope that it will inspire further studies to resolve social dilemmas.
Highlights
The emergence and maintenance of cooperation through natural selection is an enduring conundrum in evolutionary biology and other related disciplines [1]
We have shown that inferring reputation, i.e. the ability of identifying the highest reputation neighbors as potential strategy donors, may be seen as an universally applicable promoter of cooperation irrespective of the underlying interaction networks and evolutionary games
By means of extensive simulations, we have found that cooperators with high reputation play a crucial role in the evolution
Summary
The emergence and maintenance of cooperation through natural selection is an enduring conundrum in evolutionary biology and other related disciplines [1]. According to the Darwinian evolutionary theory [2], any behavior that contributes benefits to others but not directly to oneself will soon disappear. This is not fully consistent with the ubiquitous existence of cooperative behaviors in uncountable biological or social settings, especially in animal and human societies [3,4,5,6]. The prisoner’s dilemma game is often employed to investigate how the cooperation evolves between pairwise interactions, and various extensions of this model have been proposed to further understand the origin of cooperation [19,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36]. Two players must simultaneously decide to either cooperate (C) or defect (D) without knowing the coplayer’s decision, and the corresponding payoff matrix can be described as follows, CD
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