Diversity of rationality affects cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma game

TL;DR

This study explores how varying individual rationality, modeled as proportional to node degree raised to a power, influences cooperation dynamics in a spatial prisoner's dilemma game on scale-free networks, revealing complex promotion and inhibition effects.

Contribution

Introduces a model where individual rationality varies with node degree to analyze its impact on cooperation in networked games, providing new insights into social dynamics.

Findings

Rationality diversity significantly affects cooperation levels.

Middle-degree nodes play a critical role in evolution.

Both promotion and inhibition of cooperation observed depending on parameters.

Abstract

In real world, individual rationality varies for the sake of the diversity of people's individuality. In order to investigate how diversity of agent's rationality affects the evolution of cooperation, we introduce the individual rationality proportional to the $\beta$th power of the each agent's degree. Simulation results on heterogeneous scale-free network show that the dynamic process is greatly affected by the diversity of rationality. Both promotion and inhibition of cooperative behavior can be observed at different region of parameter $\beta$. We present explanation to these results by quantitative and qualitative analysis. The nodes with middle degree value are found to play a critical role in the evolutionary processes. The inspiration from our work may provide us a deeper comprehension towards some social phenomenon.