Social diversity promotes cooperation in spatial multigames

¹ Department of Automation, University of Science and Technology of China - Hefei 230027, China
² Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor - Koroška cesta 160, SI-2000 Maribor, Slovenia
³ CAMTP – Center for Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics - Mladinska 3, SI-2000 Maribor, Slovenia

Received: 3 May 2017
Accepted: 16 May 2017

Abstract

Social diversity is omnipresent in the modern world. Here we introduce this diversity into spatial multigames and study its impact on the evolution of cooperation. Multigames are characterized by two or more different social dilemmas being contested among players in the population. When a fraction of players plays the prisoner's dilemma game while the remainder plays the snowdrift game cooperation becomes a difficult proposition. We show that social diversity, determined by the payoff scaling factors from the uniform, exponential or power-law distribution, significantly promotes cooperation. In particular, the stronger the social diversity, the more widespread cooperative behavior becomes. Monte Carlo simulations on the square lattice reveal that a power-law distribution of social diversity is in fact optimal for socially favorable states, thus resonating with findings previously reported for single social dilemmas. We also show that the same promotion mechanism works in time-varying environments, thus further generalizing the important role of social diversity for cooperation in social dilemmas.