Super-rational aspiration induced strategy updating promotes cooperation in the asymmetric prisoner's dilemma game

Abstract

Avoiding social dilemmas requires that some partners forgo partial or complete benefits to help one another within a cooperative system. Although recognitions and memories with social partners could help these altruistic agents obtain a reward, either immediately or in the future, thus avoiding social dilemmas. However, a state of complete information is often not possible. In this paper, we introduced a super-rational aspiration induced strategy updating in an asymmetric prisoner's dilemma game, where agents adjust their strategies in line with their payoffs and aspirations. If their payoffs from a strategy reach or exceed the aspiration level, which may be rational or super-rational, they retain their strategies. Otherwise, they imitate another agent's strategy. This updating rule focuses on satisficing rather than optimizing and does not require agents to have additional information from the strategic environment, which is thus considered to be spontaneous. We modeled this mechanism in different spatial settings. The simulation and analytical results show that the high degrees of super-rationality and asymmetry are more effective in promoting cooperation among agents. This suggests that super-rational aspiration induced strategy updating in the asymmetric prisoner's dilemma game could be a novel rule to maintain cooperative interaction among egoistic agents.