The persistence-based game transition resolves the social dilemma.

Exploring the emergence of cooperation in the populations of self-interested individuals is of huge challenge. Evolutionary game theory has been utilized to investigate the evolution of cooperation. In recent years, many researchers have paid massive attention on the evolution of cooperative behavior from the perspective of multiple games, especially the transition of games. Nevertheless, not only are the current interactive actions crucial, but also the historical interactive experience is fateful. Motivated by this, the persistence-based game transition mechanism is proposed and introduced to investigate the evolution of cooperation, where both the current pairwise strategies and the persistence of the pairwise strategies determine the game played in the next time step. Through analyzing the evolutionary results of strategies and games, we find that the cooperation can be facilitated by the enhanced network reciprocity as the persistence-based game transition makes mutual cooperators play games with weak dilemma more persistently. • A persistence-based game transition is proposed in multi-games. • In our model, both pairwise interactive strategies and the persistence of pairwise strategies determine the game transition. • The persistence-based game transition can facilitate cooperation through enhancing network reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]