Works
- The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984
In Tactics of Organizational Politics
Ideas
Tit for tat and the shadow of the future. In computer tournaments of the repeated prisoner's dilemma, the winning strategy was tit for tat, submitted by Anatol Rapoport: cooperate on the first move, then do whatever the other player did last. Axelrod attributed its success to being nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear, and showed that cooperation can emerge among self-interested players when the likelihood of meeting again, the shadow of the future, is large enough.
What it explains
Axelrod explains why cooperation among rivals inside an organization is sustainable when they expect to deal with each other again: reliable reciprocity, quick to answer defection and quick to forgive, is hard to exploit. Lengthening the shadow of the future makes cooperation more likely.
Tactics that draw on Robert Axelrod (1)
In Thinking Tools
Known for
A political scientist who ran two computer tournaments of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma around 1980 and reported in The Evolution of Cooperation that tit for tat, a strategy that cooperates first and then copies the other player's last move, did best.