The Evolution of Cooperation

The Evolution of Cooperation (english The Evolution of Cooperation) is the title of a 1984 original English and published in 1987 in the German translation of the book by political scientist Robert Axelrod, based on several journal articles of the author. The work modeled from a game theory perspective as cooperation among selfish individuals even can come about if it is not enforced by an external authority, by morality or law.

Content

Axelrod is based on an iterative prisoner's dilemma. In this simple two -player game, both players have the incentive to behave uncooperative when rational and selfish act - if no further issues such as morality or mutual trust will be added, and if they do only once and then never again in this encounter situation. The dilemma of the prisoner's dilemma is that although defection for each player from his perspective right ( rational) would be, but it is a non- zero-sum game in which not only one can win, but both can maximize the total profit through cooperation.

Axelrod examined what results when repeated this situation many times over; when the two players meet again and again, without knowing when they will meet for the last time ( iterated prisoner's dilemma ). From the outset, there is no best strategy because the strategy always depends on the opponent's strategy. In two programming competitions he did meet several, sometimes very sophisticated strategies. Its programs are many people from different disciplines, including mathematicians, computer scientists, social scientists, economists and psychologists. It was found that prevail in a iterated prisoner's dilemma cooperative strategies.

It turned out that a very simple strategy both times was the most successful: Tit for Tat, won both competitions and got a total, summed over all games of the tournament, the most points. Tit for Tat sat down against the complex partially stochastic methods, including strategies that attempted tricky, to dupe the other by. Tit for Tat is to cooperate at the first meeting with another player and then always imitate in all further rounds, the behavior of the round before.

• All players are provided with the same resources. Apart from the opportunity to cooperate in the individual rounds or deny, they have no way to send rewards other players or to exercise reprisals.
• Apart from the recent history of their interaction in the previous rounds the players know nothing about each other.

These assumptions may seem quixotic. However, there are a number of real-world situations in which you'll notice this multi-round prisoners' dilemma. In essence, it always occurs when a group of people has the choice to exploit a common resource to the maximum self-interest - or to hold back in order to maximize the joint, sustainable benefits. Therefore Axelrod's work became the basis of a large number of further research into the social, political and legal sciences.

The analysis of the two competitions yielded the following conditions for a successful strategy:

Of all the competition submitted Tit for Tat strategies fulfilled these conditions best. A disadvantage arises from the non- de-escalating running backs of Tit for Tat, which this strategy is not error robust. Interprets a player cooperative behavior of his goal erroneously as a defection, then take to the mutual defection, even though both parties are oriented basically on cooperation. In politics, for example, can such misunderstandings arms race against their will lead to mutual trade embargoes or other critical developments. But not only misunderstandings, but also the exaggerated play-out of Tit -for-Tat can cause to defection always follows defection, which would result in a barely profitable chain.

Remedial action can be done by following accidental, that is, for the enemy not estimable number of repetitions is spontaneously unilaterally played cooperation to break the cycle of confrontation, which Tit for Tat, however, does not provide.

Work

Original Issue:

• The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, New York, 1984, ISBN 0-465-02122-0.

Translation:

• The evolution of cooperation. 7th edition. Oldenbourg, München 2009, ISBN 978-3-486-59172-9.

In a follow- band Axelrod summarizes several of his published after 1984 technical papers on the subject and comments on them.

• The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent -Based Models of Competition and Collaboration. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1997, ISBN 0-691-01568-6.