Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 956

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 33 of the 33 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Emergence of Cooperation among Egoists

Axelrod, Robert·1981·American Political Science Review

Abstract

This article investigates the conditions under which cooperation will emerge in a world of egoists without central authority. This problem plays an important role in such diverse fields as political philosophy, international politics, and economic and social exchange. The problem is formalized as an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with pairwise interaction among a population of individuals. Results from three approaches are reported: the tournament approach, the ecological approach, and the evolutionary approach. The evolutionary approach is the most general since all possible strategies can be taken into account. A series of theorems is presented which show: (1) the conditions under which no strategy can do any better than the population average if the others are using the reciprocal cooperation strategy of TIT FOR TAT, (2) the necessary and sufficient conditions for a strategy to be collectively stable, and (3) how cooperation can emerge from a small cluster of discriminating individuals even when everyone else is using a strategy of unconditional defection.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.2307/1961366

Cites

33 of 33 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 33 references

Cited by

See all 956

Metadata

Authors
Axelrod, R.
Venue
American Political Science Review
Published
1981-06
Volume
75
Issue
2
Pages
306-318
ISSN
  • 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5943
OpenAlex
W2022924224
Cited by
956
References
33
FWCI
107.01
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Emergence of Cooperation among Egoists. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/1961366
The paper
Axelrod, R. (1981). The Emergence of Cooperation among Egoists. American Political Science Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/1961366

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.