Emergence of cooperation promoted by higher-order strategy updates

Dini Wang; Peng Yi; Yiguang Hong; Jie Chen; Gang Yan

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arXiv · 2501.15698

Emergence of cooperation promoted by higher-order strategy updates

Dini Wang·Peng Yi·Yiguang Hong·Jie Chen·Gang Yan

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Abstract

Cooperation is fundamental to human societies, and the interaction structure among individuals profoundly shapes its emergence and evolution. In real-world scenarios, cooperation prevails in multi-group (higher-order) populations, beyond just dyadic behaviors. Despite recent studies on group dilemmas in higher-order networks, the exploration of cooperation driven by higher-order strategy updates remains limited due to the intricacy and indivisibility of group-wise interactions. Here we investigate four categories of higher-order mechanisms for strategy updates in public goods games and establish their mathematical conditions for the emergence of cooperation. Such conditions uncover the impact of both higher-order strategy updates and network properties on evolutionary outcomes, notably highlighting the enhancement of cooperation by overlaps between groups. Interestingly, we discover that the strategical mechanism alternating optimality and randomness -- selecting an outstanding group and then imitating a random individual within this group -- can prominently promote cooperation. Our analyses further unveil that, compared to pairwise interactions, higher-order strategy updates generally improve cooperation in most higher-order networks. These findings underscore the pivotal role of higher-order strategy updates in fostering collective cooperation in complex social systems.

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Dini Wang, Peng Yi, Yiguang Hong, Jie Chen, Gang Yan. 2025-01-26. Emergence of cooperation promoted by higher-order strategy updates. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15698

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