OUR PHILOSOPHY
BE RECOGNIZABLE AND INNOVATIVE
C10 PHILOSOPHY
The Robert Axelrod principles
While Axelrod’s1 principles were originally developed in the context of game theory and social dilemmas, their application in the business world demonstrates how cooperation and trust can yield significant benefits for companies, ultimately contributing to long-term success and sustainability. At our core, we embrace Axelrod’s philosophy of cooperation, and we ardently strive to embody its principles in our daily work. Trust, collaboration, and mutual understanding form the bedrock of our commitment to delivering top-notch services.
BE RECOGNIZABLE
The ability to recognize the other player from past interactions, and to remember the relevant features of those interactions, is necessary to sustain cooperation. Without these abilities, a player could not use any form of reciprocity and hence could not encourage the other to cooperate.
ENLARGE THE SHADOW OF THE FUTURE
Mutual cooperation can be stable if the future is sufficiently important relative to the present. This is because the players can each use an implicit threat of retaliation against the other’s defection, if the interaction will last long enough to make the threat effective.
TIT FOR TAT STRATEGY
Promote cooperation with simple and clear strategies and and maintain a balance between trust and reciprocity.
MAINTAIN RECIPROCITY
A strategy based on reciprocity can allow the other player to get the reward for mutual
cooperation. An optimal strategy might be to return only nine-tenths of a tit for a tat. This would help dampen the echoing of conflict and still provide an incentive to the other player not to try any gratuitous defections. It would be a strategy based on reciprocity, but would be a bit more forgiving than TIT FOR TAT.
EMPHASIZE THE PAYOFFS
To promote cooperation through modification of the payoffs, it is not necessary to go so far as to eliminate the tension between the short-run incentive to defect and the longer-run incentive to achieve mutual cooperation. It is only necessary to make the long-term incentive for mutual cooperation greater than the short-term incentive for defection.
- Robert Axelrod; The Evolution of Cooperation ↩︎