Incorporating dominant environment into individual fitness promotes cooperation in the spatial prisoners' dilemma game

In spatial evolutionary games, the fitness of each player is usually measured by its inheritance (i.e. the accumulated payoffs by playing the game with its all nearest neighbors), or by the linear combination of its inheritance and its environment (i.e. the average of its all nearest neighbors' inheritance). However, a rational individual incorporates environment into its fitness to develop itself only when environment is dominant in real life. Here, we redefine the individual fitness as a linear combination of inheritance and environment when environment performs better than inheritance. Multiple Monte Carlo simulation results show that incorporating dominant environment can improve cooperation comparing with the traditional case, and furthermore increasing the proportion of prevailing environment can enhance cooperative level better. These findings indicate that our mechanism enhances the individual ability to adapt environment, and makes the spatial reciprocity more efficient. Besides, we also verify its robustness against different game models and various topology structures. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.