Reputation-based co-evolutionary model promotes cooperation in prisoner's dilemma game

Indirect reciprocity is a fascinating topic in the field of social cooperation. In this paper, we propose a novel updating strategy based on the critical reputation-aware calculation. The joint of reputation allows players to make decisions not only on current payoffs but also from a third party, which improves the status of cooperators in the prisoner's dilemma game and provides a possibility for surviving. Experiments show that the discrepancies in initial fitness caused by reputation will support cooperators in occupying a high proportion in communities. Interestingly, we find that the massive scale of reputation fluctuation helps to enhance the cooperative effect, and newly name this character as “quasi-time lag”. The simulations show that the promotion of our proposed mechanism is effective and robust on different network topologies. This work provides a new perspective for the study of the cooperative game.