The effect of recommended role models in prisoner’s dilemma game

Previous studies concerning the prisoner’s dilemma game on graphs conventionally assume that individuals select role models from their replacement graphs at random. We propose a extended prisoner’s dilemma game model to study the impact of recommended role models on the evolution of cooperation in a homogeneous population. Individuals are endowed with the capacity to recommend the ones they imitated in the past to their neighbors for strategy updating. Numerical simulations show that cooperation can be improved significantly when recommendation is allowed. Our results might be helpful in explaining the widespread cooperation in the real world.