Coevolution of game strategy and link weight promotes cooperation in structured population

Evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game in structured populations on a weighted square lattice, on which the edge weight represents the relationship between agents and adaptively changes in time, has been proved to be an efficient way that can promote cooperation. In fact, such an adaptive link weight introduces a new time scale tau(a), not necessarily equal to the time scale of game strategy tau(epsilon). Inspired from aforementioned above, we investigate the effect of w = tau(epsilon)/tau(a) on the evolution of cooperative behavior. Through numerical simulation, we find cooperation can be promoted effectively with a larger value of w, which is related to the increase of average link weight in the structured population. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.