TY - JOUR
T1 - Inferring Reputation Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation in Spatial Social Dilemma Games
AU - Wang, Zhen
AU - Wang, Lin
AU - Yin, Zi Yu
AU - Xia, Cheng Yi
N1 - CYX acknowledges the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 60904063) and the Tianjin Municipal Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11JCYBJC06600). ZW acknowledges the support from the Center for Asia Studies of Nankai University (Grant No. 2010-5). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher copyright:
© 2012 Wang et al.
PY - 2012/7/9
Y1 - 2012/7/9
N2 - In realistic world individuals with high reputation are more likely to influence the collective behaviors. Due to the cost and error of information dissemination, however, it is unreasonable to assign each individual with a complete cognitive power, which means that not everyone can accurately realize others' reputation situation. Here we introduce the mechanism of inferring reputation into the selection of potential strategy sources to explore the evolution of cooperation. Before the game each player is assigned with a randomly distributed parameter p denoting his ability to infer the reputation of others. The parameter p of each individual is kept constant during the game. The value of p indicates that the neighbor possessing highest reputation is chosen with the probability p and randomly choosing an opponent is left with the probability 1-p. We find that this novel mechanism can be seen as an universally applicable promoter of cooperation, which works on various interaction networks and in different types of evolutionary game. Of particular interest is the fact that, in the early stages of evolutionary process, cooperators with high reputation who are easily regarded as the potential strategy donors can quickly lead to the formation of extremely robust clusters of cooperators that are impervious to defector attacks. These clusters eventually help cooperators reach their undisputed dominance, which transcends what can be warranted by the spatial reciprocity alone. Moreover, we provide complete phase diagrams to depict the impact of uncertainty in strategy adoptions and conclude that the effective interaction topology structure may be altered under such a mechanism. When the estimation of reputation is extended, we also show that the moderate value of evaluation factor enables cooperation to thrive best. We thus present a viable method of understanding the ubiquitous cooperative behaviors in nature and hope that it will inspire further studies to resolve social dilemmas.
AB - In realistic world individuals with high reputation are more likely to influence the collective behaviors. Due to the cost and error of information dissemination, however, it is unreasonable to assign each individual with a complete cognitive power, which means that not everyone can accurately realize others' reputation situation. Here we introduce the mechanism of inferring reputation into the selection of potential strategy sources to explore the evolution of cooperation. Before the game each player is assigned with a randomly distributed parameter p denoting his ability to infer the reputation of others. The parameter p of each individual is kept constant during the game. The value of p indicates that the neighbor possessing highest reputation is chosen with the probability p and randomly choosing an opponent is left with the probability 1-p. We find that this novel mechanism can be seen as an universally applicable promoter of cooperation, which works on various interaction networks and in different types of evolutionary game. Of particular interest is the fact that, in the early stages of evolutionary process, cooperators with high reputation who are easily regarded as the potential strategy donors can quickly lead to the formation of extremely robust clusters of cooperators that are impervious to defector attacks. These clusters eventually help cooperators reach their undisputed dominance, which transcends what can be warranted by the spatial reciprocity alone. Moreover, we provide complete phase diagrams to depict the impact of uncertainty in strategy adoptions and conclude that the effective interaction topology structure may be altered under such a mechanism. When the estimation of reputation is extended, we also show that the moderate value of evaluation factor enables cooperation to thrive best. We thus present a viable method of understanding the ubiquitous cooperative behaviors in nature and hope that it will inspire further studies to resolve social dilemmas.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84863620860&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0040218
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0040218
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 22808120
AN - SCOPUS:84863620860
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 7
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
IS - 7
M1 - e40218
ER -
