Does coveting the performance of neighbors of thy neighbor enhance spatial reciprocity?

Understanding the emergence and prevalence of cooperation among selfish agents is a long-standing puzzle in the scientific community, various mechanisms and models have been proposed to account for the cooperative behaviors. In this work, we present a modified strategy update dynamics in which the environmental information is added into the standard Fermi rule. Extensive numerical simulations have demonstrated that cooperation can be strongly promoted under our novel update dynamics. Our results also indicate that referring the environmental information during the strategy update is helpful for fostering the cooperative clusters and avoiding to be exploited by the defectors. Our results provide further insights into competition and cooperation, and contribute to explain the collective cooperation in many real systems.