Analysis of evolutionary dynamics of strategies with updatable attributes in asymmetric population

¹ School of Mathematics and Statistics, Northwestern Polytechnical University - Xi'an, 710072, Shaanxi, China
² Shenzhen Research Institute, Northwestern Polytechnical University - Shenzhen, 518057, Guangdong, China
³ Shaanxi Provincial Key Laboratory of Intelligent Game Theory and Information Processing at Higher Education Institutions - Xi'an, 710072, China

Received: 13 May 2025
Accepted: 1 October 2025

Abstract

The heterogeneity of individuals drives inequality to be ubiquitous in society, which results in the disintegration of cooperative behavior. Therefore, studying the evolution of cooperation is crucial in asymmetric populations. This work investigates the evolutionary dynamics with updatable attribute strategies that incorporate the individual self-social satisfaction in asymmetric populations. The attributes of individuals are divided into the reputation-oriented and the profit-oriented ones. Individuals use the Fermi update rule to adjust their strategies based on their payoffs and modify their attributes according to their self-social satisfaction. The simulations suggest that the decline of cooperators can be slowed and maintained at a stable level when individuals have lower self-social satisfaction. Notably, imposing stronger punishments on payoff-oriented individuals leads the entire population to a state in which all individuals become reputation-oriented.