Contact-based model for strategy updating and evolution of cooperation

•A different way of establishing strategy update is proposed.•Strategy update depends on the switching probability between strategies.•The conditions fostering the coexistence of strategies can be calculated.•Consulting more agents for strategy update promotes the coexistence of strategies.

To establish an available model for the astoundingly strategy decision process of players is not easy, sparking heated debate about the related strategy updating rules is intriguing. Models for evolutionary games have traditionally assumed that players imitate their successful partners by the comparison of respective payoffs, raising the question of what happens if the game information is not easily available. Focusing on this yet-unsolved case, the motivation behind the work presented here is to establish a novel model for the updating of states in a spatial population, by detouring the required payoffs in previous models and considering much more players’ contact patterns. It can be handy and understandable to employ switching probabilities for determining the microscopic dynamics of strategy evolution. Our results illuminate the conditions under which the steady coexistence of competing strategies is possible. These findings reveal that the evolutionary fate of the coexisting strategies can be calculated analytically, and provide novel hints for the resolution of cooperative dilemmas in a competitive context. We hope that our results have disclosed new explanations about the survival and coexistence of competing strategies in structured populations.