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A moral of the story is that models that aim to explore fundamental processes should be judged by their fruitfulness, not by their accuracy. For this purpose, realistic representation of many details is unnecessary and even counterproductive.

— Robert Axelrod The Complexity of Cooperation (1997)

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More quotes by Robert Axelrod

What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that the players might meet again.

The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

Proposition 5. ALL D is always collectively stable.

The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

The two-person iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is the E. coli of the social sciences, allowing a very large variety of studies to be undertaken in a common framework.

The Complexity of Cooperation (1997)

Proposition 3. Any strategy which may be the first to cooperate can be collectively stable only when w is sufficiently large.

The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

Proposition 4. For a nice strategy to be collectively stable, it must be provoked by the very first defection of the other player.

The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Axelrod (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.