Social Structure and the Emergence of Norms among Rational Actors

Anatol Rapoport has been a major contributor to the application of game theory to problems in the social sciences. One of his lesser-heralded accomplishments is his submitting the winning entries for two tournaments based on an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game, organized by Robert Axelrod (1984). This work led Axelrod into the study of how cooperative strategies might evolve in populations of interacting individuals in an incentive structure that allowed exploitation of the other, and the strategy employed by Rapoport in his winning entries played an important role in Axelrod’s development of these ideas.