Making new connections towards cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game

Abstract

Evolution of cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game is studied where initially all players are linked via a regular graph, having four neighbors each. Simultaneously with the strategy evolution, players are allowed to make new connections and thus permanently extend their neighborhoods, provided they have been successful in passing their strategy to the opponents. We show that this simple coevolutionary rule shifts the survival barrier of cooperators towards high temptations to defect and results in highly heterogeneous interaction networks with an exponential fit best characterizing their degree distributions. In particular, there exist an optimal maximal degree for the promotion of cooperation, warranting the best exchange of information between influential players.

6 two-column pages, 7 figures; accepted for publication in Europhysics Letters

References in corpus (6)

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Resolving social dilemmas on evolving random networks
• Impact of aging on the evolution of cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game
• Evolution of cooperation on scale-free networks subject to error and attack
• Emergence of multilevel selection in the prisoner's dilemma game on coevolving random networks
• Diversity of reproduction time scale promotes cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma games
• Effects of strategy-migration direction and noise in the evolutionary spatial prisoner's dilemma