Imitating Contributed Players Promotes Cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game

Recently, researchers become increasingly interested in studying cooperation in evolutionary game theory by learning people’s behavior patterns in real world. One of the patterns is that when some people contribute more to a group, their behaviors are more likely to be imitated by their neighbors. Inspired by this, we introduce a preferential selection mechanism that players have higher probability in learning from their contributed counterparts. We follow the lattice arrangement of players and conduct spatial prisoner’s dilemma game. We define the contribution of individual by the payoffs of his four neighbors, and a larger value corresponds to greater contribution. In strategy updating stage, we first calculate the contribution of all players, and then, for each player, we propose one of his neighbors to imitate according to their contribution. At last, we decide to imitate or not by Femi’s dynamics. The simulations have justified our acclaim that imitating contributed players can prompt cooperation. This paper helps us understand why and how cooperation emerges in real world.