Suchergebnisse

It is a great honor for the American Political Science Association to
have Robert Axelrod as our current president. Axelrod combines a devotion
to rigorous science as well as a deep concern with policy issues,
particularly those of international peace and the threat of nuclear war.
His fascination and distress about threats to peace is a major source of
the fantastic energy he has brought to his work. Simultaneously, his
insistence on rigorous exploration on the processes that enhance
cooperation in complex settings has ensured that his theoretical
breakthroughs have been widely recognized across the social sciences as
well as in biology and computer sciences. I
wish to thank Michael Cohen, Robert Keohane, Rick Riolo, Robert Putnam,
Carl Simon, and Leigh Tesfatsion for their input and comments on this
biographical essay and Nicole Todd and Patty Lezotte for their help in
preparing this essay.

In the past few decades, the progressive political ideal of strong central governments or collective morality being necessary to enforce cooperative behavior has become widely-accepted. However, many philosophers throughout history, especially that from the classical liberalism tradition, have espoused free market, open society ideals arguing not only that governments are the source of much of the immorality and conflict many are afraid of, but also that man left in a free environment can and will cooperate and develop naturally moral systems that allow for economic and societal development. Robert Axelrod, more recently, studied this debate using the famous Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game from traditional game theory and applied computer science to find that, indeed, cooperation can arise naturally even between selfish prisoners. This paper develops the study further by examining more realistic situations of PD games involving multiple players, using computer simulations, i.e. agent-based modeling, and finds that Axelrod's original conclusions hold true.