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Four factors are examined which can give rise to interesting types of social structure: labels, reputation, regulation, and territoriality. A label i… - Robert Axelrod
" "Four factors are examined which can give rise to interesting types of social structure: labels, reputation, regulation, and territoriality. A label is a fixed characteristic of a player, such as sex or skin color, which can be observed by the other player. It can give rise to stable forms of stereotyping and status hierarchies. The reputation of a player is malleable and comes into being when another player has information about the strategy that the first one has employed with other players. Reputations give rise to a variety of phenomena. including incentives to establish a reputation as a bully, and incentives to deter others from being bullies. Regulation is a relationship between a government and the governed. Governments cannot rule only through deterrence, but must instead achieve the voluntary compliance of the majority of the governed. Therefore regulation gives rise to the problems of just how stringent the rules and the enforcement procedures should be. Finally, territoriality occurs when players interact with their neighbors rather than with just anyone. It can give rise to fascinating patterns of behavior as strategies spread through a population.
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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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Native Name:
Robert Marshall Axelrod
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Robert M. Axelrod
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Axelrod
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Additional quotes by 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.
2. Change the payoffs
A common reaction of someone caught in a Prisoner's Dilemma is that "there ought to be a law against this sort of thing." In fact, getting out of Prisoner's Dilemmas is one of the primary functions of government: to make sure that when individuals do not have private incentives to cooperate, they will be required to do the socially useful thing anyway. Laws are passed to cause people to pay their taxes, not to steal, and to honor contracts with strangers. Each of these activities could be regarded as a giant Prisoner's Dilemma game with many players.
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Thus cooperation can emerge even in a world of unconditional defection. The development cannot take place if it is tried only by scattered individuals who have no chance to interact with each other. But cooperation can emerge from small clusters of discriminating individuals, as long as these individuals have even a small proportion of their interactions with each other. Moreover, if nice strategies (those which are never the first to defect) come to be adopted by virtually everyone, then those individuals can afford to be generous in dealing with any others. By doing so well with each other, a population of nice rules can protect themselves against clusters of individuals using any other strategy just as well as they can protect themselves against single individuals. But for a nice strategy to be stable in the collective sense, it must be provocable. So mutual cooperation can emerge in a world of egoists without central control by starting with a cluster of individuals who rely on reciprocity.
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