Information accuracy of migration and imitation influences the evolution of cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma

Abstract

Migration is ubiquitous in both biological worlds and human societies for seeking more suitable environments or greater benefits. Intensive studies have revealed that it may provide an effective mechanism to promote cooperation in the context of spatial prisoner' dilemma. As an attempt to give a more generic analysis on how migration influences the evolution of cooperation, we in this work propose a dynamic model that takes into account the agents' different tendencies on migration and imitation. More importantly, we introduce two information accuracy parameters that respectively affect the agents' decisions on the migration destination and on their imitation in the current neighborhood. The simulation results show that the higher accuracy of the information on imitation and migration contributes to a higher cooperation level. In particular, the imitation-oriented mode is more conducive to cooperation when the imitation information accuracy is high. Likewise, the migration-oriented mode is more conducive to cooperation with higher accuracy of the migration information. When imitation and migration information accuracies are both high, cooperation is effectively maintained in two different ways: the imitation-dominant pattern and the migration-dominant pattern, while the scenario in which the imitation tendency is close to the migration tendency has an inhibitory effect on cooperation. Finally, we analyse the robustness of the results under different population densities.