The impact of dynamic asymmetric activity on the evolution of cooperation

To characterize the evolution of cooperation in real-world scenarios, this paper develops an evolutionary game model with dynamic asymmetric activity. In the model, players are classified into leaders and followers according to the comparison between their strategy persistence and the threshold β, and each individual x’s node-weight (influence) wx is adjusted adaptively based on whether the game payoff meets the aspiration level Ax. Importantly, the leader-type player is allowed to incorporate the node-weight (influence) wx into fitness calculation, whereas the follower-type player solely relies on the game payoff, which induces a role-dependent and dynamically evolving asymmetry in effective competitiveness. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations show that this mechanism can substantially promote cooperation and mitigate spatial social dilemmas. Micro-level analyses further reveal that cooperation enhancement requires the coordinated emergence of leader-type cooperators and follower-type cooperators, which together suppress the spread of defection. Moreover, the statistical results indicate that the facilitating effect of cooperation is not strictly positively correlated with the heterogeneity of node-weight. At last, robustness tests across different dilemma types, network topologies, and strategy update schemes confirm that the main findings remain qualitatively unchanged, demonstrating the generality of the proposed mechanism. These results provide a parsimonious framework for understanding how dynamic asymmetry can reshape evolutionary pathways toward cooperative behavior.