The effect of link rewiring on a coevolutionary common pool resource game

For exploitation of social-ecological systems, cooperation has been considered to be a prerequisite to avoid the tragedy of the commons. As was theorized, coupling strategic and ecological dynamics could cause social regime shifts when the resource supply is sufficiently abundant. Regime shifts indicate the collapse of social cooperation and the loss of natural resources. The phenomenon has been demonstrated in an integrated society with static complex social networks; however, exploiting agents could dynamically switch their partners (i.e., link rewiring in social networks) in the real world. In this study, we investigate the evolution of cooperation in a coupled social-ecological model in which the ecosystem evolves according to the intrinsic rules and human extracting strategy, and agents are allowed to either change their strategies or switch their partners. Our results show that link rewiring has positive and negative effects on the evolution of cooperation in the common pool resource game according to both social and ecological attributes. Importantly, the partner switching can stabilize the cooperation when the resource has high inflow or reproductivity. These results broaden our understanding of the coevolution of structural, strategic, and ecological dynamics in a common pool resource game; the results also illustrate the importance of reputation mechanisms in the sustainable development of social-ecological systems.