Impact of reputation assortment on tag-mediated altruistic behaviors in the spatial lattice

We present a novel donation game model to investigate the impact of reputation on the evolution of tag-mediated altruistic behaviors, in which the donors need to simultaneously take the information of a recipient's reputation and tag into account when making decisions. In detail, each individual can be randomly endowed with a tunable reputation value and a fixed tag at the initial stage, the donor's reputation will be adaptively varied by the adjustment increment R-g according to the action at each game round. In addition, another tunable parameter omega is used to control the strategy spreading ability of the individual with lower reputation. Through extensive simulations, the results indicate that the combination of reputation and tag greatly promotes the evolution of altruistic behaviors within the structured population. When other parameters are fixed, the smaller the value of omega is, the more obvious the advantage of dominant strategy becomes. It is also found that the reputation threshold has a decisive effect on the dominant strategy within the population. The current results suggest that the reputation contributes significantly to the evolution of cooperation in the population with the green beard effect, we hope our work can provide some valuable clues for exploring the altruistic behaviors in the future. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

In this study, a novel donation game model was proposed to investigate the impact of reputation on the evolution of tag-mediated altruistic behaviors. The results indicate that the combination of reputation and tag greatly promotes the evolution of altruistic behaviors within a structured population, and the reputation threshold has a decisive effect on the dominant strategy within the population.