Reputation-based partner choice promotes cooperation in social networks

By Feng Fu, C. Hauert, Martin A. Nowak, Long Wang. Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 2008

632 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the cooperation dynamics attributed to the interplay between evolution of individual strategies and evolution of individual partnerships. We focus on the effect of reputation on individual's partner switching process. We assume individuals can either change their strategies by imitating their partners or adjust their partnerships based on local information about reputations. We manipulate the partner switching in two ways, that is, individuals can switch from the lowest reputation partners, either to their partners' partners who have the highest reputation (i.e., ordering in partnership) or to others randomly chosen from the entire population (i.e., randomness in partnership). We show that when individuals are able to alter their behavioral strategies and their social interaction partnerships on the basis of reputation, cooperation can prevail. We find that the larger temptation to defect and the denser the partner network, the more frequently individuals need shift their partnerships in order for cooperation to thrive. Furthermore, increasing tendency of switching to partners' partners is more likely to lead to higher level of cooperation. We show that when reputation is absent in such partner-switching process, cooperation is much less favored than that of reputation involved. Moreover, we investigate the effect of discounting individual's reputation on the evolution of cooperation. Our results highlight the importance of consideration of reputation (indirect reciprocity) on promotion of cooperation when individuals can adjust their partnerships.

Subfields: Genetics, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9a09e510744c2e5b597d018705ddfcf262f037c

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Citations in the corpus

Win-Stay-Lose-Learn Promotes Cooperation in the Spatial Prisoner's Dilemma Game (2012, background): “Somewhat more personallyinspired features supporting the evolution of cooperation involve memory effects [49], heterogeneous teaching activity [50–52], preferential learning [53,54], mobility [55–59], myopically selective interactions [60], and coevolutionary partner choice [61–63], to name but a fe”
Games on graphs (2014, background): “tionships may change based on prior interactions [90], [23], [75], [74] reputations [25], or other factors [99], [98], [105], [119], [13].”
Coevolutionary games - A mini review (2009, neutral): “…2006a,b; Santos et al., 2006a; Li et al., 2007; Fu et al., 2007a; Tanimoto, 2007a; Biely et al., 2007; Pacheco et al., 2008; Van Segbroeck et al., 2008; Pestelacci et al., 2008; Fu et al., 2008; Chen et al., 2008b; Tanimoto, 2009b; Fu et al., 2009b; Van Segbroeck et al., 2009; Qin et al., 2009).”