Inferring to individual diversity promotes the cooperation in the spatial prisoner's dilemma game

We explore the evolution of cooperation in a spatial prisoner's dilemma game in which the individual diversity is taken into account. In our model, all players are divided into two types which own different strategy spreading factors, hence the evolution of strategy (i.e., cooperation or defection) distribution is not only determined by an iterated strategy adoption from a randomly selected neighbor according to a probability related with their payoff difference, but also by the type of the chosen neighbor. For an influential players (i.e., A-type), we fix the multiplicative factor of strategy transfer to be 1.0; But for the non-influential ones (i.e., B-type), we impose a multiplicative factor (w <= 1.0) during the process of strategy adoption, and within the whole population w will follow a uniform or an exponential distribution among the given ranges. Large quantities of simulations indicate that the cooperation will be highly varied for different neighborhood setup (k = 4, 8 and 24) when we integrate this kind of distributed multiplicative factor into the strategy evolution. Meanwhile, the clustering of cooperators are substantially facilitated by the individual diversity. Our numerical results can help to further illustrate the evolution of cooperation under the real-world circumstances. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.