Long deliberation times promote cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game

摘要

Some individuals could be quite cautious when making decisions and do not update their strategy frequently in the prisoner's dilemma game. That is, instead of updating their strategy immediately after the game, they make decisions only after a certain period of deliberation. Moreover, individuals' strategy update is based on the cumulative payoffs they got from their prior update. Since individuals in a group could be homogeneous or heterogeneous, their strategy can depend on two aspects: the initial time of the update and the length of its delay time. In this paper, three different cases that may lead to the delay of strategy update are taken into consideration. We find that introducing a deliberation mechanism can promote cooperation, that this effect could be greater when the delay time is extended, and that heterogeneity among individuals also has a positive effect on cooperation. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.