Diversity of reproduction rate supports cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game on complex networks

A. Szolnoki (), M. Perc and G. Szabó

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 2008, vol. 61, issue 4, 505-509

Abstract: In human societies the probability of strategy adoption from a given person may be affected by the personal features. Now we investigate how an artificially imposed restricted ability to reproduce, overruling ones fitness, affects an evolutionary process. For this purpose we employ the evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game on different complex graphs. Reproduction restrictions can have a facilitative effect on the evolution of cooperation that sets in irrespective of particularities of the interaction network. Indeed, an appropriate fraction of less fertile individuals may lead to full supremacy of cooperators where otherwise defection would be widespread. By studying cooperation levels within the group of individuals having full reproduction capabilities, we reveal that the recent mechanism for the promotion of cooperation is conceptually similar to the one reported previously for scale-free networks. Our results suggest that the diversity in the reproduction capability, related to inherently different attitudes of individuals, can enforce the emergence of cooperative behavior among selfish competitors. Copyright EDP Sciences/Società Italiana di Fisica/Springer-Verlag 2008

Keywords: 02.50.Le Decision theory and game theory; 89.75.Fb Structures and organization in complex systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (63)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00099-7 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eurphb:v:61:y:2008:i:4:p:505-509

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10051

DOI: 10.1140/epjb/e2008-00099-7

Access Statistics for this article

The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems is currently edited by P. Hänggi and Angel Rubio

More articles in The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems from Springer, EDP Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().