Role of adaptive migration in promoting cooperation in spatial games

Recent work has revealed that success-driven migration can promote cooperation among selfish individuals in evolutionary games. This migration mechanism relies, however, on nonlocal information about the states of the individuals and their computational capabilities for prediction. We investigate the role of adaptive migration in cooperative behavior in the framework of spatial game by proposing an alternative migration strategy that requires only local information obtainable through game interactions. Our results demonstrate that adaptive migration can be effective in promoting cooperation in two ways. First, there exists an optimal degree of migration associated with the density of empty sites and migration speed, which leads to the highest level of cooperation. Second, adaptive migration can induce an outbreak of cooperation from an environment dominated by defectors. These findings hold for common types of evolutionary games that involve pairwise interactions.