Eur. Phys. J. B (2013) 86: 127
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2013-40076-5

Regular Article

Effects of directional migration on prisoner’s dilemma game in a square domain

¹ School of Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, P.R. China
² School of Electronics and Information, Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, Hangzhou 310018, P.R. China
³ Department of Physics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, P.R. China

^a e-mail: hycheng@bupt.edu.cn

Received: 5 November 2012
Received in final form: 26 January 2013
Published online: 1 April 2013

Abstract

We introduce a new migration rule, the directional migration, into evolutionary prisoner’s dilemma games defined in a square domain with periodic boundary conditions. We find that cooperation can be enhanced to a much higher level than the case in the absence of migration. Additionally, the presence of the directional migration has profound impact on the population structure: the directional migration drives individuals to form a number of dense clusters which resembles social cohesion. The evolutionary game theory incorporating the directional migration can reproduce some real characteristics of populations in human society and may shed light on the problem of social cohesion.