Payoff redistribution coupled to influence and reputation promotes cooperation in the spatial prisoner’s dilemma game

Cooperation in social systems remains a central challenge under selfish incentives and social dilemmas, motivating the search for mechanisms that can sustain it. To address this issue, we propose a coevolutionary framework that couples donation, individual influence, and reputation through a closed feedback loop. The donation rule redistributes resources from high-payoff individuals to their poorest neighbors, reshaping post-donation payoffs and compressing local payoff disparities. These post-donation payoffs drive influence adaptation and reputation updating, and reputation further biases strategy updating. Our simulations reveal that two control parameters, the donation intensity u and the influence adaptation rate δ, jointly shape the coevolutionary dynamics. Cooperation shows a pronounced nonmonotonic dependence on δ and a clear transition structure in the (δ,u) plane, with the most robust cooperation emerging within a favorable range of δ, while larger u further enlarges the cooperative region. Mechanistically, increasing u compresses post-donation payoff disparities and stabilizes cooperative clusters and reputation structures, whereas δ controls how rapidly influence and reputation respond to post-donation performance, with overly slow or overly fast responses undermining stability. Our findings clarify how coupled social feedback and redistribution jointly drive self-organization in structured populations and offer a scalable modeling framework for adaptive learning in nonlinear networked evolutionary systems.