Leaders should be more persistent in evolutionary social dilemmas

School of Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications - Beijing 100876, PRC

^(a) qldai@bupt.edu.cn

Received: 3 August 2018
Accepted: 25 September 2018

Abstract

Strategy persistence has been found to play an important role in the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. In this work, we propose a spatial prisoner's dilemma game in which there are two types of individuals, P-individuals with nonzero strategy persistence level and NP-individuals without strategy persistence. We concern with the question: Who should P-individuals be if the goal is to achieve a high level of cooperation? By investigating four different schemes, i.e., uniform, inversely degree-related, degree-related, and collective influence schemes, we find that highly cooperative outcomes emerge if P-individuals are played by leaders with high degrees regardless of the structures of the underlying networks. In contrast, if the masses with low degrees act as P-individuals where leaders change their strategies frequently, cooperation cannot be promoted and, instead, it can even be weakened.