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[Francisco C. Santos][Marta D. Santos][Jorge M.Pacheco]
- Santos, F. C., S. D. Marta and J. M. Pacheco. (2008). 'Social Diversity Promotes the Emergence of Cooperation in Public Goods Games'. Nature 454(10): 213-216.
Humans often cooperate in public goods games and situations ranging from family issues to global warming. However, evolutionary game theory predicts that the temptation to forgo the public good mostly wins over collective cooperative actions, and this is often also seen in economic experiments. Here we show how social diversity provides an escape from this apparent paradox. Up to now, individuals have been treated as equivalent in all respects, in sharp contrast with real-life situations, where diversity is ubiquitous. We introduce social diversity by means of heterogeneous graphs and show that cooperation is promoted by the diversity associated with the number and size of the public goods game in which each individual participates and with the individual contribution to each such game. When social diversities follow a scale-free distribution, cooperation is enhanced whenever all individuals are expected to contribute a fixed amount irrespective of the plethora of public goods games in which they engage. Our results may help to explain the emergence of cooperation in the absence of mechanisms based on individual reputation and punishment. Combining social diversity with reputation and punishment will provide instrumental clues on the self-organisation of social communities and their economical implications.
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[Peter Kollok]
- Kollok, P. (1998).'SOCIAL DILEMMAS: The Anatomy of Cooperation'.Annual Review of Sociology 24: 183-214
The study of social dilemmas is the study of the tension between individual and collective rationality. In a social dilemma, individually reasonable behavior leads to a situation in which everyone is worse off. The first part of this review is a discussion of categories of social dilemmas and how they are modeled. The key two-person social dilemmas (Prisoner's Dilemma, Assurance, Chicken) and multiple-person social dilemmas (public goods dilemmas and commons dilemmas) are examined. The second part is an extended treatment of possible solutions for social dilemmas. These solutions are organized into three broad categories based on whether the solutions assume egoistic actors and whether the structure of the situation can be changed: Motivational solutions assume actors are not completely egoistic and so give some weight to the outcomes of their partners. Strategic solutions assume egoistic actors, and neither of these categories of solutions involve changing the fundamental structure of the situation. Solutions that do involve changing the rules of the game are considered in the section on structural solutions. I conclude the review with a discussion of current research and directions for future work.
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[Mosse, D]
- Mosse, D. (2004). "Is Good Policy Unimplementable?: Reflections on ethnography of aid policy and practice". Development and Change 35(4): 639-671.
Despite the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models in development, strangely little attention is given to the relationship between these models and the practices and events that they are expected to generate or legitimize. Focusing on the unfolding activities of a development project over more than ten years as it falls under different policy regimes, this article challenges the assumption that development practice is driven by policy, suggesting that the things that make for 'good policy'— policy which legitimizes and mobilizes political support — in reality make it rather unimplementable within its chosen institutions and regions. But although development practice is driven by a multilayered complex of relationships and the culture of organizations rather than policy, development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorized policy, because it is always in their interest to do so. The article places these observations within the wider context of the anthropology of development and reflects on the place, method and contribution of development ethnography.
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0012-155X.2004.00374.x
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- Malone, T. W. and K. Crowston (1990). 'What is coordination theory and how can it help design cooperative work systems?'. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=99367&coll=portal&dl=ACM
It is possible to design cooperative work tools based only on “common sense” and good intuitions. But the history of technology is replete with examples of good theories greatly aiding the development of useful technology. Where, then, might we look for theories to help us design computer-supported cooperative work tools? In this paper, we will describe one possible perspective—the interdisciplinary study of coordination—that focuses, in part, on how people work together now and how they might do so differently with new information technologies. In one sense, there is little that is new about the study of coordination. Many different disciplines—including computer science, sociology, political science, management science, systems theory, economics, linguistics, and psychology—have all dealt, in one way or another, with fundamental questions about coordination. Furthermore, several previous writers have suggested that theories about coordination are likely to be important for designing cooperative work tools (e.g., [Holt88], [Wino86]). We hope to suggest here, however, that the potential for fruitful interdisciplinary connections concerning coordination is much greater than has as yet been widely appreciated. For instance, we believe that fundamentally similar coordination phenomena arise—unrecognized as such—in many of the fields listed above. Though a single coherent body of theory about coordination does not yet exist, many different disciplines could both contribute to and benefit from more general theories of coordination. Of particular interest to researchers in the field of computer-supported cooperative work is the prospect of drawing on a much richer body of existing and future work in these fields than has previously been suggested. In this paper, we will first describe what we mean by “coordination theory” and give examples of how previous research on computer-supported cooperative work can be interpreted from this perspective. We will then suggest one way of developing this perspective further by proposing tentative definitions of coordination and analyzing its components in more detail.
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- Crowston, K. (1996). 'Evolving Novel Organizational Forms'. Journal of Computational Organization Theory.
A key problem in organization theory is to suggest new organizational forms. In this paper, I suggest the use of genetic algorithms to search for novel organizational forms by reproducing some of the mechanics of organizational evolution. Issues in using genetic algorithms include identification of the unit of selection, development of a representation and determination of a method for calculating organizational fitness. As an example of the approach, I test a proposition of Thompson's about how interdependent positions should be assigned to groups. Representing an organization as a collection of routines might be more general and still amenable to evolution with a genetic algorithm. I conclude by discussing possible objections to the application of this technique.
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- Hayashi, N. and G. Herman (2002). 'A Coordination-theory Approach to Exploring Process Alternatives for Designing Differentiated Products'. MIT Sloan School Working Paper (4362/02).
This paper describes a new systematic method for exploring and evaluating alternatives of a product design process for differentiated products - those that share some elements but also have differentiating features. Based on coordination theory, the method clarifies the opportunities and risks of process alternatives. The method consists of three steps:
1) finding applicable differentiation approaches, 2) finding applicable patterns of process coordination, and 3) evaluating total costs of the process alternatives.
We categorized the differentiation approaches as a taxonomy of design processes; the taxonomy includes approaches of adding or removing differentiating elements or sorting results. We also categorize how these are limited by type of interim resource in a design process. We outline three patterns of process coordination and how this interacts with the choice of product differentiation approaches. We show how the process alternatives vary in the success rate of the coordination and how this probability affects total cost of executing a design process. It raises an awareness of the importance of managing dependencies between activities, which many process analyses don't focus on.
We also show how to calculate the success rate associated with varying the coordination cost or how to calculate coordination cost associated with a desired success rate. These calculated values indicate "break-even points" for the cost of the process.
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Batley, R. and G. Larbi (2004). 'The Experience of Contracting', in ‘The Changing Role of Government: The Reform of Public Services in Developing Countries' Palgrave, Macmillan .
http://www.gsdrc.org/go/display/document/legacyid/1274
- Emphasis on formal enforcement facilities of contract
- Benefits of contracting as bases of monitoring and evaluation to measure efficiency and effictiveness
