The influence of reputation levels and disparities on the evolution of cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma game

Abstract

Benefiting from the development of information science and technology, more and more scholars use various complex networks as evolutionary carriers to research evolutionary game theory, which leads to the gradual unraveling of many evolutionary mechanisms. The reputation mechanism is particularly interesting and important among many mechanisms. Therefore, it has received widespread attention and research from related researchers, which is also mainly attributed to the important effect of reputation in promoting cooperation of evolution system. However, until now, the role of reputation mechanism in facilitating the evolution of cooperation has not been completely accurately revealed. In reality, the mechanism of mutual imitation of behaviors between interactive individuals based on reputation factors is still an interesting and unsolved problem. In this work, a novel evolutionary mechanism is proposed based on reputation levels and disparities, in which the evolutionary strategy of imitator is influenced by the reputation disparities of the imitated and the imitator. Moreover, based on the proposed evolutionary mechanism, this paper also explores the influence of reputation levels on the evolution of cooperation. Monte Carlo simulations verify that the proposed evolutionary mechanism is easier to promote cooperation of evolution system, especially when the reputation weight factor is larger, or the number of reputation levels is fewer, compared with the traditional PDG model. The study also indirectly reveals that streamlining the institutions is easy to promote social harmony and development.