Hello folks, in this unit we're going to
look at two extremely simple models of a
rather complex phenomenon;
that is, the phenomenon of cooperation in
social systems. How is it that intrinsically
selfish individuals living in a society, or
any kind of social group, learn or find a way
to cooperate in order to increase the
benefit for all members of the group?
That's what these models are about.
We're going to look at two of the most
famous of such models, the Prisoner's
Dilemma model and the so-called
El-Farol Model. Let's get started.
The existence of cooperation is often a
mystery, in biology and in the social sciences.
The main assumption of natural selection,
and much of social and economic theory is
that individuals act in order to maximize
their own so-called "utility" which might
mean: their reproductive success, their profit,
their happiness, or what have you. In
short, individuals are assumed to be selfish
and yet the phenomenon of cooperation and
even altruism are evident at all levels of biology
and in society. How does this come about? So
this leads to some questions. How is it that
cooperation comes about in biological
populations? In communities? In societies
of selfish individuals? And how does it
persist? And finally, how can we create
conditions to make it happen? It's very
difficult to design experiments to explore
these questions. So, people have, especially
in the field of complex systems, largely looked
at these kinds of questions through the
use of simplified computer models which
often are called "idea models". An idea
model is an idealized model of a phenomenon
that shows that a proposed mechanism might
be plausible, or two explore general
mechanisms that underlie behavior, explore
the effects of different kinds of environments,
different kinds of parameters on the
behavior, et cetera. In this unit, we're
going to take a quick tour of two classic
idea models in this area. First, the Prisoner's
Dilemma model, which has been explored
in great detail by political scientist
Robert Axelrod and the so-called El-Farol
problem which was devised by economist
Brian Arthur. Really, this is just going to
scratch the surface of idea models
addressing questions about cooperation in social
systems. But hopefully, this will give you a flavor
of the kinds of things that people have done
in the past and I've put a number of
references up on our course materials
page to get you started with some reading
with some reading about things that have
been going on more recently in this area.