Punishment and reputation based partners-switching promotes cooperation in social networks

To investigate the cooperation dynamics caused by coevolution of game strategy and social contacts, we propose a behavioral punishment and reputation based partners-switching mechanism, in which individuals are allowed to sever unwanted partnerships and establish new ones with next-nearest neighbors having high reputations. Simulation results show that cooperation is significantly promoted under the proposed mechanism. Under greater temptation to defect or in denser networks, social partners changing needs to be adequately frequent to support the spread of cooperative behavior. For a given average degree or temptation to defect b, a critical value for time scale ratio W can be observed, above which cooperators occupy the whole population. Our results show that the structural dynamics facilitates the emergence of an underlying heterogeneous network, which provides a favorable network topology for cooperation to prevail under strategy dynamics.