The influence of environment-based reputation on cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma game

Abstract

Research has shown that reputation mechanism can be effective in facilitating the generation and maintenance of cooperation in social dilemmas. In the traditional reputation mechanism, the amount of change in reputation is fixed. However, in real life, people's impression scores of a player are often influenced by the environment in which he lives. In other words, we prefer to celebrate the cooperative heroes who are surrounded by defectors and spurn the defectors who are hidden among the many cooperators. Thus, this paper proposes an environment-based reputation model, in which the increment of a player's reputation will be influenced by the local and global environment. The results of the research indicate that the greater the intensity of the environmental influence, the more it promotes the evolution of cooperation. It is worth noting that the local and global environmental focus shows peculiarities. Focusing on the global environment can improve the fraction of cooperators at low defection temptations while focusing on the local environment will facilitate cooperators’ survival at higher defection temptations.