The Evolution of Cooperation

Axelrod, R., & Hamilton, W. D. (1981). The Evolution of Cooperation. Science, 211(4489), 1390-1396.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1981

DOI

10.1126/science.7466396

Link

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7466396

Cited from

economics_finance, information_theory, sociology_anthropology

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Informal Enforcement
  • Evolutionary biology: Cooperation stabilized by reciprocal punishment, partner-switching, and the withdrawal of future cooperation among individuals with no central enforcer — the population-level account of how altruistic restraint persists despite the temptation to defect.

    This sourceGame-theoretic foundation showing how reciprocity (tit-for-tat) stabilizes cooperation among self-interested agents with no central enforcer; supports the evolutionary-biology claim about cooperation sustained by reciprocal reaction.

• Non-Zero-Sum Game
  • In biology and ecology, mutualism, reciprocal altruism, and cooperative breeding are non-zero-sum; predator-prey at a single interaction is zero-sum but at the population level shifts into non-zero-sum coevolution.

    This sourceShows how reciprocal cooperation can be individually rational and evolutionarily stable in non-zero-sum interactions, including biological mutualism and reciprocal altruism.

• Social Dilemma
  • A practitioner who has internalized the dilemma in one substrate carries a working toolkit — repeat, enforce, reprice, commit — into every other substrate that presents the same matrix, which is the practical payoff of treating the social dilemma as a substrate-independent structure rather than a story about prisoners.

    This sourceGame-theoretic foundation showing how reciprocity (tit-for-tat) stabilizes cooperation among self-interested agents with no central enforcer; supports the evolutionary-biology claim about cooperation sustained by reciprocal reaction.

Verification

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Registry ID ref:b191eff42072 · see in the full table