Evolution of cooperation driven by majority-pressure based interdependence

Abstract

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The evolution of cooperation on interdependent networks is arousing increasing concern based on the fact that more and more complex systems in the real-world have been proven to be organized in the form of multi-layer networks rather than single-layer networks. In this study, we examine the effects of self-organized interdependence on the evolution and stabilization of cooperation with social dilemmas depicted by the Prisoner's Dilemma Game (PDG) and the Public Goods Game (PGG) in which agents with the most common strategy have the chance to be rewarded proportionally to the fitness of corresponding agents belonging to the other network. We show that such a type-free rewarding rule, independent of game strategy, establishes a time-varying interdependence between two initially independent populations whereby cooperation is highly promoted as well as stabilized both in the two-player PDG and in the multi-player PGG. Majority-pressure based interdependence at stake has proven pretty neutral in regard to game strategy because it is contingent on strategy configuration rather than strategy itself, which thus gives birth to homologous communities, including cooperative as well as non-cooperative, and thereby an enhanced spatial reciprocity between non-identical networks is triggered. Of particular interest is the double-edged sword effect of network interdependence on cooperation although in most instances the heavier the interdependence, the better the evolution of cooperation. Furthermore, interpretations of the nontrivial relationship between cooperation and benchmark threshold measuring the strategy's local popularity highlight that rewarding the minimum majority is optimal for the evolution of cooperation in such scenario. Finally, we claim our observations are also quite robust with respect to mutation.