CORES-AD 57 Cooperation

Course Overview

Hardly a week goes by without a major news story concerning the need for cooperation between countries, political parties, organizations, individuals. This course will explore the issue of cooperation using insights from economics, evolutionary biology, mathematics, social psychology and anthropology. The main questions to be addressed are: When is cooperation desirable? When should an individual, an organization or a country expect others to cooperate? Why do some people fail to cooperate even when it would be to their benefit? What factors undermine cooperation? How can we engineer cooperation? Students will read classic books and articles on cooperation, participate in experiments, solve problems, discuss case studies spanning different cultures and time, and face a real-world cooperation problem which they will have to solve. Instructor: Nikos Nikiforakis

Lecture Notes [Student Version]

• Evolutionary Game Theory

NetLogo Programs [You need install NetLogo to run the following programs]

• Evolutionary dynamics of 2x2 games

• Spatial Prisoner's Dilemma [10 by 10 grid with payoff information]

• Spatial 2x2 games [10 by 10 grid with payoff information]

• Evolution of Ethnocentrism

• Schelling's Model of Segregation