Asymmetrical interactions driven by strategic persistence effectively alleviate social dilemmas

Asymmetry is a common phenomenon in real life due to constraints such as status, age, information, reputation, and so on. Yet it is still unclear how asymmetrical interactions driven by adaptive feedback affect the evolution of cooperation. To this end, we creatively propose a novel asymmetric interaction model driven by strategy persistence to unravel this mystery. In particular, players whose strategy persistence is beyond the threshold β are the pearls for being able to interact with all of the neighbors. Otherwise, they can only interact with half of their neighbors as the layfolks. As the strategy persistence is always updated, leading to the fact that the pearls and the layfolks maybe switch at any time, which adds uncertainty to the evolution of cooperation. Simulation results show that the asymmetrical interactions of adaptive feedback effectively alleviate social dilemmas, thus opening up a path for cooperators to survive. Moreover, with the increase of β, there is an appropriate interval resulting in the optimal evolution of cooperation. Micro analysis further indicates that the pearl cooperators play an irreplaceable pivotal role in promoting the evolution of cooperation. At last, we use other social dilemmas, network topologies, strategy update patterns, and payoff normalization to verify the applicability and robustness of the designed model.