  Understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a
fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and is frequently studied by the
framework of evolutionary game theory. A very powerful mechanism to promote
cooperation is network reciprocity, where the interaction patterns and
opportunities for strategy spread of agents are constrained to limited sets of
permanent interactions partners. Cooperation survives because it is possible
for close-knit communities of cooperation to be shielded from invasion by
defectors. Here we show that parameter ranges in which cooperation can survive
are strongly expanded if game play on networks is skewed towards more frequent
interactions with more successful neighbours. In particular, if agents
exclusively select neighbors for game play that are more successful than
themselves, cooperation can even dominate in situations in which it would die
out if interaction neighbours were chosen without a bias or with a preference
for less successful opponents. We demonstrate that the "selecting fitter
neighbours" strategy is evolutionarily stable. Moreover, it will emerge as the
dominant strategy out of an initially random population of agents.
