Coevolution of teaching activity promotes cooperation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how evolving teaching activity among players in spatial evolutionary games can promote cooperation, leading to inhomogeneities that support cooperative behavior in prisoner's dilemma and snowdrift games.

Contribution

It introduces a mechanism where teaching activity coevolves with strategies, enhancing cooperation in spatial games.

Findings

Inhomogeneities in teaching activity support cooperation.

The mechanism is effective in prisoner's dilemma and snowdrift games.

Optimal increment value enhances cooperation stability.

Abstract

Evolutionary games are studied where the teaching activity of players can evolve in time. Initially all players following either the cooperative or defecting strategy are distributed on a square lattice. The rate of strategy adoption is determined by the payoff difference and a teaching activity characterizing the donor's capability to enforce its strategy on the opponent. Each successful strategy adoption process is accompanied with an increase in the donor's teaching activity. By applying an optimum value of the increment this simple mechanism spontaneously creates relevant inhomogeneities in the teaching activities that support the maintenance of cooperation for both the prisoner's dilemma and the snowdrift game.