Certain communities of Papua New Guinea participate in a kind of multiple (as opposed to collective) authorship of collectively owned cultural products, which may shed light on emerging property rights problems around common pool resources such as the human genome that are in some sense owned collectively.
The decentralized organizational form, non-proprietary standards, and tradition of cooperative exchange (sharing information and outsourcing for component parts) of electronics firms in California's Silicon Valley explain why the region was able to keep up with the fast pace of technological progress during the 1980s, while the vertically integrated firms of the Massachusetts Route 128 beltway fell behind.
Cross-scale (vertical) interactions among resource regimes must be planned in such a way that maximizes the benefits of interaction by higher levels of social organization (comprehensive planning with respect to ecosystems management and equity) and minimizes the disadvantages (bias towards economically and politically powerful parties).
Evidence is cited that strong reciprocity (repaying cooperation and punishing defection, cheating, violation of fairness norms), which plays a role in the provision of public goods and contradicts theories of selfish actors, is neither a maladaptation, nor explained in an evolutionary context by kin selection, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, or costly signaling.
Studying comparative levels of citizens' satisfaction with civic institutions when Italy instituted regional government made possible a multi-decade study that revealed how centuries-old norms of trust, reciprocity, and social networks among the inhabitants of regions led to high levels of civic and economic success, while the absence of rich lateral ties predicted lower levels of success and satisfaction in other regions.
The authors demonstrate that homo sapiens is occasionally a prey species today, that existing apes and monkeys are hunted extensively by various predators, and that various early Homo sapiens ancestor fossils show marks consistent with predation.
In addition to self-interested behavior, various experimental games have been able to quantifiably demonstrate behavior with preferences for altruism, equality and reciprocity, reflections of a human dedication to social norms even at personal cost.
From mathematical modeling of the risk factors and uncertainty involved in a party’s continued conflict, withdrawal from conflict or commitment to a peace agreement, the distributional aspects surrounding civil war negotiations are shown to determine the robustness and range of potential settlements; the actual moves of conflicting parties in civil wars are found to reflect the dynamics of game theoretical models.
Synergies that convey advantages drive and accelerate biological and cultural evolution by providing a package of independent elements that confer benefits many times greater than those conferred by individual elements: in biology, synergies of independently evolved traits can lead to the development of the power of flight or the emergence of humans as the dominant species; in humans, complex, coordinated activity over sustained periods leverages the power of physical tools, cultural discoveries, and social organization.
Network forms of organization, with reciprocal patterns of communication and exchange, are alternatives to hierarchically or market based governance structures; they are more suited to describing companies involved in an intricate latticework of collaborative ventures with other firms over extended periods of time.
