Cooperation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is about cooperation as used in the social sciences. For co-operation in evolution, see Co-operation (evolution). For the economic model, see Cooperative.
Cooperation, co-operation, or coöperation, refers to the practice of people or greater entities working in common with commonly agreed upon goals and possibly methods, instead of working separately in competition.
Cooperation is the antithesis of competition, however, the need or desire to compete with others is a very common impetus that motivates individuals to organize into a group and cooperate with each other in order to form a stronger competitive force.
Cooperation in many areas such as, farming and housing may be in the form of a cooperative or, alternately, in the form of a conventional business.
Many people support cooperation as the ideal form of management of human affairs. In terms of individuals obtaining goods and services, rather than resorting to theft or confiscation, they may cooperate by trading with each other or by altruistic sharing.
Certain forms of cooperation are illegal in some jurisdictions because they alter the nature of access by others to economic or other resources. Thus, cooperation in the form of cartels or price-fixing may be illegal.
A few mechanisms have been suggested for the appearance of cooperation between humans or in natural systemContents |
[edit] The Prisoner's Dilemma
Even if all members of a group would benefit if all cooperate, individual self-interest may not favor cooperation. The prisoner's dilemma codifies this problem and has been the subject of much research, both theoretical and experimental. Results from experimental economics show that humans often act more cooperatively than strict self-interest would seem to dictate.
One reason for this may be that if the prisoner's dilemma situation is repeated (see iterated prisoner's dilemma), it allows non-cooperation to be punished more, and cooperation to be rewarded more, than the single-shot version of the problem would suggest. It has been suggested that this is one reason for the evolution of complex emotional and social behavior in higher animals.
There are five main conditions that tend to be necessary for cooperative behaviour to develop between two individuals:
- An overlap in desires
- A chance of future encounters with the same individual
- Memory of past encounters with that individual
- A value associated with future outcomes
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod, Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-02121-2
- The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1990), second edition -- includes two chapters about the evolution of cooperation, ISBN 0-19-286092-5
- The Seven Challenges: A Workbook and Reader About Communicating More Cooperatively, Dennis Rivers, fourth edition, 2005 -- treats cooperation as a set of skills that can be improved.
[edit] Notes
- ↑ The third variant is now somewhat rare. This is a rare example of a diacritic not borrowed from any foreign language, but purely of English origin (compare the original French coopération). See the list of English words with diacritics for other examples
[edit] External links
- MetaCollab.net, a free collaborative encycolopedia on collaboration - please come and share the wikilove!
- PDF The Cooperation Project: Objectives, Accomplishments, and Proposals [rheingold.com Howard Rheingold]'s project with Stanford's Institute for the Future.
- cooperation platform for transport research (scientific) morede:Kooperation
