Timescale diversity facilitates the emergence of cooperation-extortion alliances in networked systems

摘要

Extortion strategies, which can unilaterally guarantee the extortionate agent's payoff not less than its opponent, have attracted lots of attention. It has been found that extortion plays a nontrivial role in the evolution of unconditional cooperation in networked systems. In this paper, we investigate the influence of timescale diversity on the evolution of three strategies, i.e., unconditional cooperation, unconditional defection, and extortion. It is shown that diversifying the timescales can significantly promote the emergence of unconditional cooperation. Particularly, with the diversity of timescales, cooperators can slow down their update speed while obtaining high payoffs. Therefore, they are able to form stable alliances with extortioners, which helps them to resist the invasion of defectors. Eventually, the cooperation-extortion alliance can eliminate defection in the networked system. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.