Effective usage of credit records promotes cooperation on weighted networks

The cooperative behaviors of players on weighted networks are investigated by incorporation of trust mechanisms into a well-accepted game model, i.e., the networked prisoner's dilemma game, afterwards some weight-updating schemes are designed according to the credit records. Despite the differences in network topologies and strategy updating protocols, a simple yet significant principle surfaces that, to promote the emergence of cooperation over abundant weighted networks, only the latest credit record of partners is required to be taken into consideration, whereas incorporating more previous records may even deteriorate the cooperation performance. To support such an appealing principle, we have investigated more deeply into the role of credit records so as to give a detailed explanation underlying it. The virtue of this work lies in providing insights into the effective usage of the currently available credit records.