Leaders should be more persistent in evolutionary social dilemmas

Abstract

Strategy persistence has been found to play an important role in the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. In this work, we propose a spatial prisoner's dilemma game in which there are two types of individuals, P-individuals with nonzero strategy persistence level and NP-individuals without strategy persistence. We concern with the question: Who should P-individuals be if the goal is to achieve a high level of cooperation? By investigating four different schemes, i.e., uniform, inversely degree-related, degree-related, and collective influence schemes, we find that highly cooperative outcomes emerge if P-individuals are played by leaders with high degrees regardless of the structures of the underlying networks. In contrast, if the masses with low degrees act as P-individuals where leaders change their strategies frequently, cooperation cannot be promoted and, instead, it can even be weakened.