Promotion of cooperation in evolutionary snowdrift game with heterogeneous memories

Cooperative behavior is one of main concerns in evolutionary game researches. Since memory generally plays important roles when updating strategies, many memory-based mechanisms have been proposed to promote evolution cooperation and assumed that all players have identical memory capacity. To be more realistic, a heterogeneous memory mechanism is proposed for snowdrift game in the present paper, whose core lies in: (i) The whole population is divided into two groups and each group is endowed with different memory. (ii) When updating strategies, both adopted frequency within memory interval and the payoff performance of reference strategy are taken into account. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism results in very high cooperation levels of heterogeneous population in a wide range of the ratio r, and that the strategy updating rule can also significantly facilitate cooperation of homogeneous population. Moreover, the new mechanism reveals a “heterogeneity superiority” phenomenon, that is, the cooperation level of heterogeneous population is usually higher than the weighted sum of those of two corresponding homogeneous populations. Therefore, the proposed mechanism may have potential applications to social management.