CSCS CAR Project Technical Reports and Publications

Michael Cohen, School of Information, University of Michigan.
Robert Axelrod School of Public Policy, University of Michigan
Rick Riolo Center for Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan.

Publications currently available:

• Must there be human genes specific to prosocial behavior?
  Michael D. Cohen, Robert Axelrod and Rick L. Riolo
  Forthcoming in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO), 2003.
  • PDF of paper
  • Word Doc of paper

• Evolution of cooperation without reciprocity.
  Rick L Riolo, Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen.
  Nature 414 (22 Nov 2001), pp441-3.
  Commentary by Nowak and Sigmund on the above Nature article, in the same issue:
  "Evolution: Tides of tolerance."
  Nature 414, pp 403 - 405 (2001)
  Behavioural evolution (Communication arising): Does similarity breed cooperation?
  Nature 418 (1 August 2002), pp499-500.
  (A comment by Roberts and Sherratt, and a reply by Riolo, Axelrod and Cohen.)

• The Role of Social Structure in the Maintenance of Cooperative Regimes.
  Michael D. Cohen, Rick L. Riolo and Robert Axelrod.
  Rationality and Society, 13 (2001), pp. 5-32.
  (Text in: pdf, postscript, gzipped postscript;
  Figures in PDF: figure 1, figure 2, figures 3 & 4, figures 5 & 6,
  Text and Figures in pdf.)

• On Six Advances in Cooperation Theory.
  Robert Axelrod.
  Analyse and Kritik, 22 pp. 130-151 (July 2000). (A special issue on The Evolution of Cooperation.) (PDF)

• The Emergence of Social Organization in the Prisoners' Dilemma: How Context-Preservation and other Factors Promote Cooperation.
  Michael D. Cohen, Rick L. Riolo and Robert Axelrod.
  Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 99-01-002. (Postscript text; Gzipped Postscript)
  (A pdf version, generated from the postscript above, so use the ps if you can.)

• Beyond Geography: Cooperation with persistent links in the absence of clustered neighborhoods.
  Robert Axelrod, Rick L. Riolo and Michael D. Cohen.
  Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6, 341-346.
  (Text in: PDF;
  Figures in EPS: figure 1a, figure 1b, figure 1c, figure 2a, figure 2b, figure 2c;
  Text and Figures in: pdf).

• Advancing the Art of Simulation in the Social Sciences.
  Robert Axelrod.
  Published in Rosario Conte, Rainer Hegselmann and Pietro Terna (eds.), Simulating Social Phenomena, (Berlin: Springer, 1997), pp21-40. (Postscript text; Gzipped Postscript)
  (A pdf version, generated from the postscript above, so use the ps if you can.)

• The effects of tag-mediated selection of partners in evolving populations playing the Prisoner's Dilemma.
  Rick L. Riolo. (Sante Fe Institute Working Paper 97-02-016.)

• The effects and evolution of tag-mediated selection of partners in populations playing the IPD.
  Rick L. Riolo. Proc of 7th Intern. Conf on Genetic Algorithms, Thomas Back (ed); Morgan Kaufmann, 1997.

For financial support of some of the work described in the above papers, we thank the Intel Corporation and the University of Michigan College of LS&A College Enrichment Fund. For computing facilities, we thank the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS), and the Intel Corporation.

Most of our experiments have been carried out with Drone 1.01, a tool for automatically running batch jobs of a simulation program. It allows sweeps over arbitrary sets of parameters, as well as multiple runs for each parameter set, with a separate random seed for each run. The runs may be executed either on a single computer or over the Internet on a set of remote hosts. A new version of Drone is under development, as described on its Drone SourceForge Project page.

A related resource which may be useful to those interested in research on the Prisoner's Dilemma is Robert Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation Bibliography. Note that this was compiled in 1996, so it does not include more recent publications.

A book on Harnessing Complexity by Axelrod and Cohen was published in May 2000 by Free Press.