Reputation-based strategy persistence and environmental feedback promote cooperation in spatial snowdrift games

Abstract

In complex human social environments, individuals tend to emulate those who achieve both high benefits and high reputations, rather than nice guys who maintain good reputations despite obtaining low benefits. Typically, individual reputation does not vary uniformly with the persistence of her/his strategies. Meanwhile, environmental reputation emerges from these individual reputations and in turn influences the persistence of individual strategies. Motivated by these facts, we incorporate strategy persistence and environmental feedback into the spatial snowdrift game to investigate how individual reputation affects behavioral choices and promotes social cooperation under these dual mechanisms. Specifically, we first define high-benefit individuals as those whose payoffs exceed the community average, then characterize the nonlinear dynamics of individual reputation using an exponential function, and finally construct an environmental feedback function based on local and global reputations. Simulation results demonstrate that enhanced individual reputation reinforced by high benefits and strategic persistence facilitates the propagation of cooperative behaviors. Moreover, increasing emphasis on local neighbor reputation while reducing consideration of global population reputation in environmental feedback mechanisms significantly promotes cooperation levels within the system.