Neighbor-considered migration facilitates cooperation in prisoner's dilemma games

Migration (e.g. between cities and nations) has been shown to be an effective mechanism in facilitating the evolution of cooperation in spatial games. In contingent migration (e.g. success-driven migration), individuals choose the relocation place based on their expected payoffs. In other words, success-driven migration assumes that individuals make decisions about where to migrate strategically rather than randomly. Existing behavioral experiments have shown that human have other-regarding preference. In this paper, we study individuals’ cooperation behaviors in the prisoner’s dilemma game on a two-dimensional square lattice, where individuals have other-regarding migration preference. We introduce a neighbor-considered migration strategy, which considers both benefits of individuals and their neighbors. During the migration process, an individual always moves to a reachable empty site with the highest fairness payoff, which takes the benefit of all relevant stakeholders (including the particular individual and the neighbors) into consideration. We explore the effect of the different fairness, while considering the individuals when they weigh their own interests and their neighbors’ interests. Our simulation results indicate that neighbor-considered migration can effectively promote the level of cooperation by helping cooperative clusters evade the invasion of defectors.