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What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that the players might meet again. This possibility means that the choices made today no… - Robert Axelrod
" "What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that the players might meet again. This possibility means that the choices made today not only determine the outcome of this move, but can also influence the later choices of the players. The future can therefore cast a shadow back upon the present and thereby affect the current strategic situation. But the future is less important than the present-for two reasons. The first is that players tend to value payoffs less as the time of their obtainment recedes into the future. The second is that there is always some chance that the players will not meet again. An ongoing relationship may end when one or the other player moves away, changes jobs, dies, or goes bankrupt. For these reasons, the payoff of the next move always counts less than the payoff of the current move.
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About Robert Axelrod
Robert Marshall Axelrod (born May 27, 1943) is an American political scientist and Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, best known for his interdisciplinary work on the evolution of cooperation.
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Robert Marshall Axelrod
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Robert M. Axelrod
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Axelrod
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Additional quotes by Robert Axelrod
Will there be anyone out there to reciprocate one's own initial cooperation? In some circumstances this will be hard to tell in advance. But if there has been enough time for many different strategies to be tried, and for some way of making the more successful strategies become more common, then one can be fairly confident that there will be individuals out there who will reciprocate cooperation. The reason is that even a relatively small cluster of discriminating nice rules can invade a population of meanies, and then thrive on their good scores with each other. And once nice rules get a foothold they can protect themselves from reinvasion by meanies.
So in a non-zero-sum world you do not have to do better than the other player to do well for yourself. This is especially true when you are interacting with many different players. Letting each of them do the same or a little better than you is fine, as long as you tend to do well yourself. There is no point in being envious of the success of the other player, since in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma of long duration the other's success is virtually a prerequisite of your doing well for yourself.
In this essay, we have developed and illustrated an approach for predicting the membership of alliances among firms developing and sponsoring products requiring technical standardization. We started with two simple and plausible assumptions, that a firm prefers (1) to join a large standardsetting alliance in order to increase the probability of successfully sponsoring a compatibility standard, and (2) to avoid allying with rivals in order to benefit individually from compatibility standards that emerge from the alliance’s efforts. We then defined the concept of utility as an approximation to profit maximization in terms of size and rivalry, and discussed the influences on incentives to ally in order to develop and sponsor standards. We showed that the Nash equilibria are the local minima of an energy function with this type of utility function.
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