The mechanism of individual time cost heterogeneity promotes cooperation in snowdrift game

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mechanism where individual heterogeneity in time costs influences cooperation in the snowdrift game, showing that higher time costs and greater differences between groups promote cooperation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel time cost heterogeneity mechanism and demonstrates its effectiveness in enhancing cooperation in a snowdrift game setting.

Findings

Higher individual time costs promote cooperation.

Greater differences in time costs between groups increase cooperation.

The mechanism effectively enhances cooperation in simulated environments.

Abstract

Cost of time passing plays an important role when investigate the collective behaviour in real world. Each rational individual can get a more reasonable strategy by comprehensively considering the time cost. Motivated by the fact, we here propose a mechanism with individual time cost heterogeneity whose core lies in two aspects: 1. The individuals in the rule network are divided into 2 groups: high-time cost and low-time cost. 2. Each individual is endowed with a time cost parameter, and the individuals take into account the effect of time cost on the benefit when they interact with a neighbour. The synchronous updating algorithm is used to study the evolution of cooperation with time cost on a regular lattice. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism effectively promotes cooperation in the snowdrift game. Moreover, it is revealed that the following reasons lead to a higher level of cooperation: The higher time cost, the more individuals of high-time cost in the group, and the more differences of time cost between groups when low-time cost remains unchanged.