A moderate hatred of the rich mentality promotes cooperation in prisoner’s dilemma game

Abstract

Most current studies involving prisoner’s dilemma games are formulated under the assumption that participators are rational during collective interaction. Although irrationality in some patterns has been considered in the evolution, the effects brought about by the hatred of the rich mentality have never been investigated. Here, we introduce a cumulative reward-based rule where a player will adopt an irrational strategy which is expressed in defection in the game if the cumulative reward of the opponent exceeds the threshold controlled by a given parameter. Interestingly, despite irrational defection, such rules will result in the best environment for cooperator’s viability. In addition, we have demonstrated that irrationality in this form could be favorable for the average allocation of wealth in terms of Gini coefficient.