Impact of heterogeneous activities on the evolution of cooperation

Recent empirical observations suggest a heterogeneous nature of human activities. In this paper, we investigate the impact of players' heterogeneous activities on the evolution of cooperation in the framework of evolutionary game theory. By proposing a new evolutionary rule, prisoner's dilemma game (PDG) on scale-free networks is studied. The major difference with the normal procedure is that players are assigned with different reproduction time which follows a power-law distribution. Simulations show that the cooperation is significantly increased by the behavioral pattern of players' heterogeneous activities. Especially, hubs of scale-free networks play a crucial role in the evolution of cooperation.