Robert Axelrod

• University of Michigan

How a State actor manipulates cognitive and cultural biases to influence important political and policy decisions by other States.

Despite intense efforts by intelligence agencies and countless conferences, articles and books, fundamental aspects of terrorism remain unclear: what identifies terrorists before they act; how do they radicalize; what motivates their violence; when do they act; what countermeasures are most effective? These efforts have underperformed in part becau...

Norms provide a powerful mechanism for regulating conflict in groups, even when there are more than two people and no central authority. This paper investigates the emergence and stability of behavioral norms in the context of a game played by people of limited rationality. The dynamics of this new norms game are analyzed with a computer simulation...

This article describes three aspects of the author's early work on the evolution of the cooperation. First, it explains how the idea for a computer tournament for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma was inspired by the artificial intelligence research on computer checkers and computer chess. Second, it shows how the vulnerability of simple reciprocity...

NOT all groups that the United States government classifies as terrorist organizations are equally bad or dangerous, and not all information conveyed to them that is based on political, academic or scientific expertise risks harming our national security. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court, which last week upheld a law banning the provision of “mater...

On December 14-16, 2009, a delegation from the World Federation of Scientists, including the authors, traveled to Damascus to interview senior Syrian and Palestinian leaders from Syria and various Palestinian factions, including the members of the leadership of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The objective was to gain i...

We propose that there is an opportunity to devise new cancer therapies based on the recognition that tumors have properties of ecological systems. Traditionally, localized treatment has targeted the cancer cells directly by removing them (surgery) or killing them (chemotherapy and radiation). These modes of therapy have not always been effective be...

Sacred values differ from material or instrumental values in that they incorporate moral beliefs that drive action in ways dissociated from prospects for success. Across the world, people believe that devotion to essential or core values — such as the welfare of their family and country, or their commitment to religion, honor, and justice — are, or...

Resolution of quarrels arising from conflicting sacred values, as in the Middle East, may require concessions that acknowledge the opposition's core concerns.

A Scientific Approach The facts detailed in this briefing are the results of scientific exploration of terror networks and sacred values and their association to political violence. The research is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFSOR) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Resolution of quarrels arising from conflicting sacred values, as in the Middle East, may require concessions that acknowledge the opposition's core concerns.

Using the author's own experiences, this chapter shows how agent-based modeling (ABM) can address research questions common to many disciplines, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, provide a useful multidisciplinary tool when the math is intractable, and reveal unity across disciplines. While ABM can be a hard sell, convergence within the a...

This guide provides pointers to introductory readings, software, and other materials to help newcomers become acquainted with agent-based modeling in the social sciences.

The evolution of cooperation has a well established theoretical framework based on game theory. This approach has made valuable contributions to a wide variety of disciplines, including political science, economics, and evolutionary biology. Existing cancer theory suggests that individual clones of cancer cells evolve independently from one another...

The ubiquity of cooperation has motivated a major research program over the last 50 years to discover ever more minimal conditions for the evolution of altruism. One important line of work is based on favoritism toward those who appear to be close relatives. Another important line is based on continuing interactions, whether between individuals (e....

Hamilton's rule explains when natural selection will favor altruism between conspecifics, given their degree of relatedness. In practice, indicators of relatedness (such as scent) coevolve with strategies based on these indicators, a fact not included in previous theories of kin recognition. Using a combination of simulation modeling and mathematic...

Australian and New Zealand environmental economists have played a significant role in the development of concepts and their application across three fields within their subdiscipline: non-market valuation, institutional economics and bioeconomic modelling. These contributions have been spurred on by debates within and outside the discipline. Much o...

Electronic communication allows interactions to take place over great distances. We build an agent-based model to explore whether networks that do not rely on geographic proximity can support cooperation as well as local interactions can. Adaptive agents play a four-move Prisoner's Dilemma game, where an agent's strategy specifies the probability o...

Electronic communication allows interactions to take place over great distances. We build an agent-based model to explore whether networks that do not rely on geographic proximity can support cooperation as well as local interactions can. Adaptive agents play a four- move Prisoner's Dilemma game, where an agent's strategy specifies the probability...

Roberts and Sherratt argue that if agents with identical tags are allowed a choice of behaviour, then tag similarity can no longer be a reliable guide to behaviour and so similarity does not breed cooperation. Although they are correct in noting that in our model an agent will always donate when it meets another with an identical tag, we do not bel...

We analyze the role of social structure in maintaining cooperation within a population of adaptive agents for whom cooperative behavior may be costly in the short run. We use the example of a collection of agents playing pairwise Prisoner's Dilemma. We call sustained cooperative behavior in such circumstances a 'cooperative regime'. We show that so...

While complex adaptive systems (CAS) theories focus primarily on phenomena such as systemic robustness against perturbation, self-organization, and on the emergence, transformation, and dissolution of organizational entities or action patterns, the metaphorical resonance of CAS work is not easily translated into careful scientific results. It can b...

ts. Implemented the ability to learn nested agent models in some of the agents, and demonstrated (both empirically and mathematically) the advantage that such learning can sometimes bring to the agent. Agents were built using the University of Michigan Procedural Reasoning System (UM-PRS), C ++ , and ILU/CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architec...

Landscape theory proposed a model of the alignment of actors (such as nations) based upon the importance of individual actors and their pairwise relationships. The model was implemented in simulation software and its predictions compared favourably with empirical reality given several input situations. The model successfully predicted the alignment...

Recently we have developed a framework for analyzing systems that are complex and adaptive. These properties are characteristic of community information systems. This paper sets out an abbreviated version of our framework. We then apply it to the case of community information systems, with special emphasis on extracting implications for design.

Advancing the state of the art of simulation in the social sciences requires appreciating the unique value of simulation as a third way of doing science, in contrast to both induction and deduction. Simulation can be an effective tool for discovering surprising consequences of simple assumptions. This essay offers advice for doing simulation resear...

We present a theory for predicting how business firms form alliances to develop and sponsor technical standards. Our basic assumptions are that the utility of a firm for joining a particular standard-setting alliance increases with the size of the alliance and decreases with the presence of rivals in the alliance, especially close rivals. The predi...

This paper develops the concepts and methods of a process we will call "alignment of computational models" of "docking" for short. Alignment is needed to determine whether two models can produce the same results, which in turn is the basis for critical experiments and for tests of whether one model can subsume another. We illustrate our concepts an...

Noise in the form of random errors in implementing a choice is a common problem in real-world interactions. Recent research has identified three approaches to coping with noise: adding generosity to a reciprocating strategy; adding contrition to a reciprocating strategy; and using an entirely different strategy, Pavlov, based on the idea of switchi...

How can new political actors may emerge from the aggregation of smaller political actors? This paper presents a simulation model that provides one answer. In its broadest perspective, the work can be seen as part of the study of emergent organization through "bottom-up" processes. In such "bottom-up" process, small units interact according to local...

`Stability' is a widely used concept in strategic analysis, especially in the context of nuclear strategy. This article examines the meaning of the term, and shows how it can be usefully applied to problems of conventional war, especially as these problems apply to Europe. In scientific usage, stability is the condition in which a slight disturbanc...

Axelrod's model of the evolution of cooperation was based on the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Empirical work following this approach has helped establish the prevalence of cooperation based on reciprocity. Theoretical work has led to a deeper understanding of the role of other factors in the evolution of cooperation: the number of players, the rang...

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/26661/1/0000205.pdf

This widely praised and much-discussed book explores how cooperation can emerge in a world of self-seeking egoists---whether superpowers, businesses, or individuals---when there is no central authority to police their actions.

This paper employs ideas from genetics to study the evolution of strategies in games. In complex environments, individuals are not fully able to analyze the situation and calculate their optimal strategy. Instead they can be expected to adapt their strategy over time based upon what has been effective and what has not. The genetic algorithm is demo...

This article investigates the conditions under which cooperation will emerge in a world of egoists without central authority. This problem plays an important role in such diverse fields as political philosophy, international politics, and economic and social exchange. The problem is formalized as an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with pairwise interac...

This is a study of argumentation in three different kinds of high level, confidential, foreign policy settings: a collegial setting, a bureaucratic setting, and a bargaining setting. The causal and value assertions of the participants were coded using the detailed records of these three settings. The data show to be inadequate a defense/ attack mod...

Background thinking for the Madrid terrorism summit has stemmed partly from the 9/11 Commission and Spain's Comisión 11-M. Their presentations fall short on pinpointing the sources of attacks that carry the most risk and how best to respond. Terrorist attacks over the last decades follow a power-law distribution, which anticipates future terrorist...

Despite tendencies toward convergence, differences between individuals and groups continue to exist in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. An agent-based adaptive model reveals the effects of a mechanism of convergent social influence. The actors are placed at fixed sites. The basic premise is that the more similar an actor is to a neighbor, the more...

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