Current frontiers in mobility and well-being

Abstract

Human mobility has a profound impact on social structure and collective behavior, which allows individuals to reshape group structures in response to strategy information, acting as a double-edged sword for cooperative behavior. It can both disrupt existing cooperative communities and enable individuals to escape adverse environments and seek high-quality interaction partners. This paper surveys current research progress on the impact of mobility on cooperation within the framework of evolutionary game theory, focusing on specific mechanisms of passive escape, dynamic self-organization driven by active choice, and the core trade-off between migration costs and speed. Mobility, an individual's spatial response to local strategic information that turns location into strategic advantage, influences cooperative evolution by altering interactive information and environmental feedback, consequently affecting sustainable social well-being, such as collective benefits. Under specific conditions, this self-interested behavior at the individual level can foster macrosocial harmony, embodying the unity of individual rationality and collective cooperation. Furthermore, we also discusses inter-layer migration and information routing mechanisms in multilayer networks and extends the perspective to human-machine hybrid systems where mobile agents with information regulation capabilities can serve as information supernodes. Our paper aims to provide a unified framework for understanding mobility as a combined physical and informational driving force in the evolution of cooperation.