Increased cooperation potential and risk under suppressed strategy differentiation

In peer-to-peer interaction, people have conditions to adopt different strategies against different opponents, which is called interactive diversity. Recently, the evolution of cooperation under interactive diversity has attracted much attention, but the potential cost of maintaining interactive diversity is rarely considered. Actually, individuals may need to frequently switch their strategies between interactions with different opponents. If strategy switching is costly, individuals are likely to prefer strategies that can be maintained to strategies that require frequent changes. In other words, individuals may have behavioral inertia in their interactions with different opponents. Although some studies have found that appropriate strategy switching costs or inertia can promote cooperation under interactive identity, their role under interactive diversity remains to be further discussed. The main reason is that strategy switching costs may restrain the diversity of strategies, and the differentiation of strategies is exactly the key to cooperation under interactive diversity. In this work, we are devoted to reveal the impact of strategy switching costs on the evolution of cooperation under interactive diversity. Simulation results show that appropriate strategy switching costs are also positive under interactive diversity, but higher strategy switching costs play completely different roles in different networks. Especially, cooperation in lattice network sometimes shows a nonmonotonic dependence of "first increasing, second decreasing and then increasing again" on unit switching cost. These findings are of great significance for understanding the emergence of cooperation in paired interaction under interactive diversity. & COPY; 2023 Published by Elsevier B.V.