Adaptive tag switching reinforces the coevolution of contingent cooperation and tag diversity

• Randomly selecting individuals to play games weakens network reciprocity.
• Adaptive tag switching breaks the homogeneity of interaction rate.
• Fast interaction happening relative to selection is needful to promote cooperation.
• Both large and little costs of tag switching favor the evolution of cooperation more.

Most of the previous studies concerning the similarity-based interaction have assumed that the change of tags just happens in the imitation stage. Individuals actually can adjust their tags whenever the environments related to these tags grow nasty. We institute a spatial model to investigate the effect of the coevolution of tag and strategy on the evolution of cooperation in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Interactions just happen between tag-identical neighbors. Individuals exploited by defectors change their current tags at a certain cost. The time-scale ratio controls how fast interaction happens relatively to selection. Results show that whenever individuals have enough chance to adapt to the environment, cooperation is greatly improved even for quite large temptation to defect. Intensive exploration reveals that both little and large costs of tag switching can further favor the establishment of cooperation. Our work may add more into the literature concerning games on adaptive networks.