Aggregation means the organization of elements of a system into patterns that tend to put highly compatible elements together and less compatible ele… - Robert Axelrod

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Aggregation means the organization of elements of a system into patterns that tend to put highly compatible elements together and less compatible elements apart. Landscape theory predicts how aggregation will lead to alignments among actors (such as nations), whose leaders are myopic in their assessments and incremental in their actions. The predicted configurations are based upon the attempts of actors to minimize their frustration based upon their pairwise propensities to align with some actors and oppose others. These attempts lead to a local minimum in the energy landscape of the entire system. The theory is supported by the results of the alignment of seventeen European nations in the Second World War. The theory has potential for application to coalitions of business firms, political parties in parliaments, social networks, social cleavages in democracies, and organizational structures.

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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
Alternative Names: Robert M. Axelrod Axelrod

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The tournament results show that in a Prisoner's Dilemma situation it is easy to be too clever. The very sophisticated rules did not do better than the simple ones. In fact, the so-called maximizing rules often did poorly because they got into a rut of mutual defection. A common problem with these rules is that they used complex methods of making inferences about the other player-and these inferences were wrong. Part of the problem was that a trial defection by the other player was often taken to imply that the other player could not be enticed into cooperation. But the heart of the problem was that these maximizing rules did not take into account that their own behavior would lead the other player to change.

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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 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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