The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration

The articles move beyond the basic paradigm of the Prisoner's Dilemma to study a rich set of issues, including how to cope with errors in perception or implementation, how norms emerge, and how new political actors and regions of shared culture can develop. They use the shared methodology of agent-based modeling, a powerful technique that specifies the rules of interaction between individuals and uses computer simulation to discover emergent properties of the social system. The Complexity of Cooperation is essential reading for all social scientists who are interested in issues of cooperation and complexity

No mathmatical background required and usefull referenced included.


Great Companion to'The Evolution of Cooperation'   September 25, 2003
William Bennett (tucson, arizona United States)
41 out of 44 found this review helpful

This books covers what Robert Axelrod been up to since "The Evolution of Cooperation." Extensions to the original "Prisoner's Dilemma" have required new agent behaviors for stable solutions.

"Coping with Noise" deals with agents that make mistakes in their defections and cooperation.

"Promoting Norms" covers the fact that pure self-interest isn't a stable strategy and to promote stability requires norms - common behaviors among agents. The most interesting result from his work is NOT that agents should punish defectors - that is intuitive - but agents who DON'T punish defectors (of norms) must be "persuaded" to punish defectors to keep the norm stable. I guess we all need both the carrot and stick!

"Choosing Sides" covers landscape theory - the creation of population aggregates because similar agents tend to clump together.

There are other interesting sections and I like this book. I would normally give a five to this book; however, this is also a thin book. If there were more coverage of the material and a more in depth discussion of other peoples work, I would have given it a five.