Elimination mechanism promotes cooperation in coevolutionary prisoner’s dilemma games

We propose an elimination mechanism in the study of the evolutionary prisoner’s dilemma games on evolving networks. It assumes that after each round of playing, players whose payoffs are below a certain threshold will be eliminated from the game and the same number of new nodes will be added to the network to maintain the size of the network constant. Numerical results show that moderate values of elimination threshold can result in a maximum cooperation level in the evolutionary prisoner’s dilemma game. Moreover, the elimination mechanism can make the network structure evolve into a high heterogeneity in degree distribution, which is considered to be helpful in promoting cooperation in evolutionary games. The present study may provide new insight for understanding the evolution of cooperation in light of the law ‘survival of the fittest’ in nature.