title: Boosting cooperation by involving extortion in spatial prisoner's dilemma games.
abstract: We study the evolution of cooperation in spatial prisoner's dilemma games with and without extortion by adopting the aspiration-driven strategy updating rule. We focus explicitly on how the strategy updating manner (whether synchronous or asynchronous) and also the introduction of extortion strategy affect the collective outcome of the games. By means of Monte Carlo simulations as well as dynamical cluster techniques, we find that the involvement of extortioners facilitates the boom of cooperators in the population (and whom can always dominate the population if the temptation to defect is not too large) for both synchronous and asynchronous strategy updating, in stark contrast to the other case, where cooperation is promoted for an intermediate aspiration level with synchronous strategy updating, but is remarkably inhibited if the strategy updating is implemented asynchronously. We explain the results by configurational analysis and find that the presence of extortion leads to the checkerboard-like ordering of cooperators and extortioners, which enable cooperators to prevail in the population with both strategy updating manners. Moreover, extortion itself is evolutionary stable, and therefore acts as the incubator for the evolution of cooperation.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Computational Physics and Complex Systems, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou Gansu 730000, China.
authors.forename: Zhi-Xi
authors.initials: ZX
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: CompleX Lab, Web Sciences Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu Sichuan 611731, China and Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Zhihai
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Rong