Self-Organization and Cooperation
in Social Systems
Models of Cooperation
Assumption of biology, social science, and economics: Individuals
act in order to maximize their own utility.
In other words, individuals are selfish.
Yet, cooperation and altruism are evident at all levels of biology and
society.
Questions:
How does cooperation come about in populations / communities /
societies of selfish individuals?
How does it persist?
How can we create conditions to make it happen?
Idea models
Show that a proposed mechanism for a phenomenon is
plausible
Explore general mechanisms underlying behavior
Explore effects of topology, parameters, etc. on behavior
This Unit:
Quick tour of two classic idea models
The Prisoners dilemma (Robert Axelrod)
The El Farol problem (Brian Arthur)
The Prisoners Dilemma:
A simple idea model for cooperation
Alice Bob
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The Prisoners Dilemma:
A simple idea model for cooperation
Alice Bob
Alice and Bob keep silent:
Alice gets five years in prison
Bob gets five years in prison
Alice keeps silent, Bob
testifies:
Alice gets life in prison
Bob goes free
Bob keeps silent, Alice testifies:
Bob gets life in prison
Alice goes free
Alice and Bob both testify :
Alice gets 10 years in prison
Bob gets 10 years in prison
Stay silent or testify?
What should Alice Do?
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The Prisoners Dilemma:
A simple idea model for cooperation
Alice Bob
Stay silent or testify?
What should Alice Do?
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Alice and Bob keep silent:
Alice gets five years in prison
Bob gets five years in prison
Alice keeps silent, Bob
testifies:
Alice gets life in prison
Bob goes free
Bob keeps silent, Alice testifies:
Bob gets life in prison
Alice goes free
Alice and Bob both testify :
Alice gets 10 years in prison
Bob gets 10 years in prison
The Prisoners Dilemma:
A simple idea model for cooperation
Alice Bob
Stay silent or testify?
What should Alice Do?
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450) 6
/5"-&7
$0/89:+
Alice and Bob keep silent:
Alice gets five years in prison
Bob gets five years in prison
Alice keeps silent, Bob
testifies:
Alice gets life in prison
Bob goes free
Bob keeps silent, Alice testifies:
Bob gets life in prison
Alice goes free
Alice and Bob both testify :
Alice gets 10 years in prison
Bob gets 10 years in prison
The Prisoners Dilemma:
A simple idea model for cooperation
Alice Bob
Stay silent or testify?
What should Alice Do?
,-.."/0
<&(=0
$0/8;0/333
450) 6
/5"-&7
$0/89:+
Alice and Bob keep silent:
Alice gets five years in prison
Bob gets five years in prison
Alice keeps silent, Bob
testifies:
Alice gets life in prison
Bob goes free
Bob keeps silent, Alice testifies:
Bob gets life in prison
Alice goes free
Alice and Bob both testify :
Alice gets 10 years in prison
Bob gets 10 years in prison
The Prisoners Dilemma:
A simple idea model for cooperation
Alice Bob
Stay silent or testify?
What should Alice Do?
6>&& $0/89:+
6>&& $0/89:+
Alice and Bob keep silent:
Alice gets five years in prison
Bob gets five years in prison
Alice keeps silent, Bob
testifies:
Alice gets life in prison
Bob goes free
Bob keeps silent, Alice testifies:
Bob gets life in prison
Alice goes free
Alice and Bob both testify :
Alice gets 10 years in prison
Bob gets 10 years in prison
The Prisoners Dilemma:
A simple idea model for cooperation
Alice Bob
What could have convinced them to stay silent?
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0%=5+
Alice and Bob keep silent:
Alice gets five years in prison
Bob gets five years in prison
Alice keeps silent, Bob
testifies:
Alice gets life in prison
Bob goes free
Bob keeps silent, Alice testifies:
Bob gets life in prison
Alice goes free
Alice and Bob both testify :
Alice gets 10 years in prison
Bob gets 10 years in prison
Prisoners dilemma:
Invented by mathematical game theorists Flood and Dresher in 1950.
Used as a metaphor for real-world cooperation issues, such as arms
races, wars, global warming, etc.
One of the most famous and influential idea models in the social
sciences! (~34,000 results on Google Scholar)
Garret Hardin: Tragedy of the Commons
Robert Axelrod: The pursuit of self-interest by each leads to a poor
outcome for all.
Robert Axelrod
The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984
The Complexity of Cooperation, 1997
My main motivation for learning about
effective strategies was to find out how
cooperation could be promoted in international
politics, especially between the East and the
West during the Cold War.
Main Question: Under what conditions will
cooperation emerge in a world of egoists without
central authority?
Game version of the Prisoners dilemma
Payoff matrix:
Goal is to get as many points as possible (regardless of what
other player gets not a competitive game).
One round: each player either cooperates or defects, with
no prior communication
Axelrods Question: If game is iterated (the players play for
several rounds), how can reciprocal cooperation be induced?
Bob
Alice
cooperate
defect
cooperate
defect
3, 3 0, 5
5, 0
1, 1
Axelrods Prisoners Dilemma Tournaments
In the 1980s, Axelrod organized two tournaments and invited many
scientists and mathematicians to submit strategies.
The strategies played iterated games against one another in a round-
robin fashion.
Some strategies were quite complicated e.g., creating complex
predictive models of various opponents
However, the winner of both tournaments was the simplest of all the
strategies: TIT FOR TAT (submitted by Anatole Rapoport).
TIT FOR TAT: Start out by cooperating. Then at each successive
round, do what the other player did on the previous round.
Axelrods conclusions
Be Nice (never be first to defect)
Be Forgiving (be willing to cooperate if cooperation is offered)
Be Retaliatory (be willing to defect if others defect against you)
Be Clear (be transparent about what your strategy is make it
easy to infer)
TIT FOR TAT has all these attributes.
Self-Organization and Cooperation in Economics
Traditional economics
Assumptions:
Perfectly rational self-interested
agents
Each has complete knowledge of
others strategies
Each can do deductive reasoning
Result: Efficiency: Best
possible situation for all
Adam Smiths Invisible Hand
"Every individual necessarily labours to render the
annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He
generally neither intends to promote the public interest,
nor knows how much he is promoting it ... He intends
only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other
cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which
was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse
for society that it was no part of his intention. By
pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of
the society more effectually than when he really intends
to promote it. I have never known much good done by
those who affected to trade for the public good.
Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776.
Adam Smith, 1723!1790
Complexity economics:
Self-interested agents with bounded rationality
Limited knowledge of others strategies
Each does primarily inductive reasoning
Agents adapt over time to ever-changing environment
Traditional economics: Can make predictions with
analytic (mathematical) models, assuming equilibrium dynamics
Complexity economics: Analytic models often not possible; equilibria are
never reached; often need agent-based models with ability to adapt
Brian Arthurs El Farol Problem
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120921/hoLo_vldeo_4447707903273446703788_medlum.[pg?0
Brian Arthur
El Farol Model
hup://[Link]/plckle_medla1/medla/CreaL_Amerlcan_CounLry/
120921/hoLo_vldeo_4447707903273446703788_medlum.[pg?0
Live Irish music on Thursday nights
60 people will fit comfortably
100 people want to go, but only if 60 or
less go.
No prior communication among people.
Only information each person has is the
number of people that attended on each
of the last M Thursdays (everyone uses
same value of M).
E.g., if M = 3, you might have this
information: three weeks ago: 35, two
weeks ago: 76, one week ago: 20
Decision for each person: Should I go
this Thursday?
How can all the people cooperate without
communicating and without rational deductive
reasoning?
How a person decides whether to go or not
(NetLogo Model)
Each person has some number N of strategies, each of which use the information
from past Thursdays to predict attendance this Thursday. (Each person has a
possibly different set of strategies.)
For example , if N = 3, your strategies might be:
Strategy 1: Predict attendance will be the same as last week
Strategy 2: Predict attendance will be 100 last week
Strategy 3: Predict attendance will be
0.2 * last week + 0.1 * two weeks ago
Each time step of the model corresponds to a new Thursday, on which you must
decide whether to go or not go.
To make this decision, you determine which of your strategies is the current
best---the one that did the best job of predicting attendance on previous
Thursdays.
You use your current best strategy to predict attendance for the current time step.
If it predicts more than 60 people will show up (60 = overcrowding threshold),
you decide not to go; otherwise you go.
All other people do the same thing simultaneously and independently, with no
communication.
The nitty gritty details (optional)
Let N be the number of strategies each person has and let M be the number of weeks
for which the attendance number is known. Let t be the current time (week). The
previous weeks are thus t !1, t ! 2, etc. Let A(t) be the attendance at time t .
Each strategy S has the following form:
Each person has N such strategies (where the set of strategies can be different from
person to person). The weights w
i
are different for each strategy.
One of these strategies is determined to be the current best, and is denoted S*.
Each person makes a decision as follows:
If S*(t) > overcrowding-threshold, dont go; otherwise, go.
S(t) =100 w
1
A(t !1) +w
2
A(t !2) +... +w
m
A(t ! M) +c
[ ]
where w
i
"[!1,1].
The nitty gritty details, continued
Initialization: Each persons N strategies are initialized with random
Initial history: The attendance history (previous M time steps) is
initialized at random, with values between 0 and 99. (This is so
predictions can be made on the first M time steps.)
Best current strategy: At each time step t, after each person makes
their decision and learns the current attendance A(t), each person
determines their best current strategy as the one that would have been
the best predictor. This is the strategy that will be used by the person
on the next round.
w
i
!["1,1].
Choosing the Best Current Strategy
For each agent: For each strategy S, determine Error(S), which is the
difference between Ss prediction and the actual attendance for each
week in the agents memory:
The best current strategy is the strategy S* with the lowest error.
Error(S) = S(t) ! A(t) + S(t -1) ! A(t !1) +... + S(t - M) ! A(t ! M)
El Farol Model
Assumes bounded rationality, limited knowledge
Includes adaptation (inductive learning from experience)
Question: Does self-organized efficiency (best situation for all)
emerge under these conditions?
Conclusion
The El Farol model demonstrates that self-organized cooperation and
efficiency are possible without perfect rationality, complete
knowledge, and deductive reasoning!
