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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Additional quotes by Robert Axelrod

1. Enlarge the shadow of the future
Mutual cooperation can be stable if the future is sufficiently important relative to the present. This is because the players can each use an implicit threat of retaliation against the other's defection-if the interaction will last long enough to make the threat effective. Seeing how this works in a numerical example will allow the formulation of the alternative methods that can enlarge the shadow of the future.

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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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