Environmental adaptability promotes cooperation in the evolutionary game

Cooperative dynamics as a special type of complex human behavior has received increasing attention in recent years. Many previous studies investigated this problem via spatial reciprocity, where players obtain their payoffs by interacting with direct neighbors, and verified that environmental factors can influence the evolution of cooperation. In this paper, we consider the environmental adaptability in the prisoner’s dilemma game where agents can be in a dominant, intermediate or harsh environment depending on the number of the cooperative neighbors. Here, the strategy update mechanism is based on the trade-off between environmental adaptability difference and the payoff difference. Simulation results suggest that the cooperation level can be greatly enhanced in this model compared with the traditional version. Interestingly, the more emphasis on the environmental adaptability, the higher the cooperation level.