Emergent route towards cooperation in interacting games: the dynamical reciprocity

Abstract

The success of modern civilization is built upon widespread cooperation in human society, deciphering the mechanisms behind has being a major goal for centuries. A crucial fact is, however, largely missing in most prior studies that games in the real world are typically played simultaneously and interactively rather than separately as assumed. Here we introduce the idea of interacting games that different games coevolve and influence each other's decision-making. We show that as the game-game interaction becomes important, the cooperation phase transition dramatically improves, a fairly high level of cooperation is reached for all involved games when interaction goes to be strong. A mean-field theory indicates that a new mechanism -- \emph{the dynamical reciprocity}, as a counterpart to the well-known network reciprocity, is at work to foster cooperation, which is confirmed by the detailed analysis. This revealed reciprocity is robust against variations in the game type, the population structure, and the updating rules etc, and more games generally yield a higher level of cooperation. Our findings point out the great potential towards high cooperation for many issues are interwoven with each other in the real world, and also the possibility of sustaining decent cooperation even in extremely adverse circumstances.