Evolutionary Prisoner's Dilemma Game Based on Pursuing Higher Average Payoff

We investigate the prisoner's dilemma game based on a new rule: players will change their current strategies to opposite strategies with some probability if their neighbours' average payoffs are higher than theirs. Compared with the cases on regular lattices (RL) and Newman-Watts small world network (NW), cooperation can be best enhanced on the scale-free Barabási-Albert network (BA). It is found that cooperators are dispersive on RL network, which is different from previously reported results that cooperators will form large clusters to resist the invasion of defectors. Cooperative behaviours on the BA network are discussed in detail. It is found that large-degree individuals have lower cooperation level and gain higher average payoffs than that of small-degree individuals. In addition, we find that small-degree individuals more frequently change strategies than do large-degree individuals.