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PS 426 – Second Paper Assignment – S. Majeski
Due 3/16 by 5:00 P.M.

Robert Keohane, in AfterHegemony, argues that rational, egoistic actors (nation-states) who live in a self-help and competitive world (the international system), find it in their interest in some circumstances to cooperate with other actors. He argues that cooperation abounds in the international system and sets out to theorize about how to account for its presence. SimSociety is an n-agent, spatial iterated Prisoners Dilemma game. Agents are characterized as rational and egoistic (for the most part). The Prisoners Dilemma game structure creates a situation where agents can find it in their interest to cooperate with other agents. If agents can coordinate their behavior, they can improve on their own payoffs in both the short term and long term, and be far better off than if they fail to cooperate and defect. Thus, SimSociety provides a good "laboratory" to investigate if and how actors can cooperate and if and how the artificial world of SimSociety becomes cooperative or remains highly conflictual.

SimSociety allows us to create all kinds of worlds (at least in the n-actor spatial Prisoners Dilemma world) and see how they evolve. How are cooperative worlds (worlds where almost all the interactions are cooperative and where the actors that populate the world have strategies that are generally cooperative in nature) created? What kinds of actor strategies are most conducive to generating cooperative worlds? How come? How do cooperative worlds fall apart and why? What kinds of cooperative worlds (types and mixes of actor strategies) appear to be stable and are unlikely to fall apart and become worlds populated with highly defective actors? Why? What kinds of cooperative worlds fall apart. Why? What does all this have to say about Keohane’s ideas concerning the emergence of cooperation in the international system?

1) Run the basic experiments with 60 agents (you may want to vary this later for fun)

2) Leave all setting (except the agent strategies) at their default settings - that is leave them alone - -again you may want to play with them later and yo an ask me about ones you find interesting

3) I suggest running your basic simulations for 20,000 iterations - this will not take very long at all

4) To address the question of if and how cooperation can be generated in an un-cooperative, anarchic world do the following experiment

Do a minimum of five runs of each of the following mixes (20 simulation runs)

a) 50 All-D and 10 All-C
b) 50 All-D and 10 Grim
c) 50 All-D and 10 TFT
d) 50 All-D and 10 Pavlov

As a variation you might see what happens with a more nasty, greedy exploiter -- Mean TFT vs the four

5) To address the question of if and how cooperation can be maintained do the following experiment

Again do a minimum of five runs of each of the following strategy mixes (20 simulation runs)

a) 50 All-C and 10 All-D
b) 50 Grim and 10 All-D
c) 50 TFT and 10 All-D
d) 50 Pavlov and 10 All-D

Based on your results how sensitive are these results to increases and decreases in the number of All-D agents

As a variation you might see what happens with a more nasty, greedy exploiter -- Mean TFT vs the four

Here is an opportunity to be thoughtful and creative. Tell a story with data to back it up. And the key here is to link the results you get back to Keohane's arguments about cooperation. It is helpful to think about the different characteristics of the agent strategies in addressing this question.

Wendt talks about different cultures of anarchy and we learned something about the effects of these different cultures in our experiment. We cannot directly introduce the different cultures into SimSociety but we can do a couple of things related to the idea of a culture dominated by friends, rivals or enemies. Choose one of the two following options and do some analysis and address this in your paper

1. From your experiemnts in the IPD world you have learned about what kinds of strategies are successful in the relatively conflictual world of Prisoners Dilemma. If we take a STAG world as one that is more cooperative -- one more conducive to relations among friends -- what kindsof strategies and characteriscs seem to do well in generating and maintaining cooperation. Any differences from the PD world? I would run the identical set of experiments as above substituting the Stag payoffs for PD payoffs.

2. In a world owith lots of agents that seem to be acting like "enemies" (ALL-D) or (Mean TFT), what happens to agents that want to cooperate who have the opportunity to refuse to interact with those agents that continually want to take advantage of them? In effect we are giving agents some ability to discern friends from enemies and act differently toward them as a result. I would run the identical set of experiments as above but give the cooperative agents the ability to selectively interact -- i.e., not choose to play with agents that consistently defect.

You may choose to work alone or in groups (you can learn alot from your classmates but they can also lead you in non-productive directions. I'll help). However, each of you must write your own paper. In you paper, you no doubt will refer to data and perhaps graphs to illustrate your point. The page limit does not include the presentation of raw data or of graphs. I recommend strongly that you store the results from your numerous simulation runs on a floppy disk. If not, be sure you have paper copy. Remember to make sure you have a paper copy of the analysis or have it copied to a floppy before you end a computer session (that is whenever you physically logout). All data stored on the lab computers is erased when you end your session so it will not be stored on the hard drive.

Book/Simulation1Book/Simulation2
Reading AssignmentsSim Society Research Info.Paper AssignmentLecture Outlines