The Role of Reputation–Aspiration in the Evolution of Cooperation

Previous studies have demonstrated that the existence of reputation and aspiration can extremely facilitate cooperative behavior in social dilemmas. However, most of them only focus on the impact of single mechanisms on the evolution of cooperation, while ignoring the synergistic effect of multiple mechanisms. Therefore, considering the potential advantages of various mechanisms, we combine them in this paper and investigate the evolution of cooperation in the Prison’s Dilemma Game. In detail, each individual has a \( R_{asp} \) , indicating their minimum pursuit of reputation. When players are dissatisfied with their reputation, they will reduce the strategy persistence time \( \tau _i\left( t \right) \) which characterizes how long individuals adhere to their current strategy. Once \( \tau _i\left( t \right) \) drops to 0, individuals will consider changing their strategy to improve their reputation. Furthermore, we introduce a parameter \(\theta \) to reveal the willingness to change the current status. The simulation results suggest that cooperation can be greatly enhanced with the combined mechanisms, especially for the larger \( R_{asp} \) and the moderate \(\theta \) .