This paper is a summary of an Aspen Institute sponsored in-depth roundtable session, written from the perspective of one informed conference observer (Bollier). The participants are leading thinkers in the many complex areas this paper covers (economics, systems theory, human behavior, human futures, information technology evolution, etc) and are listed on page 57. A selection of their key insights shared in the paper are listed below:

A "push" economy is geared towards mass production, anticipating consumer demand, and routing resources to the right place at the right time, to create standardized and mass produced products. By contrast, a "pull" economy is based on open, flexible production platforms that are used to orchestrate a broad range of resources. Instead of producing standardized products, "pull" model companies are demand-driven, and assemble products in customized ways that serve specialized or local needs, usually using "rapid" or "on the fly" processes.

Several global corporations are moving towards "pull" methods, and away from "push" models; ie., Toyota, Dell, Cisco, Li & Fung. These companies employ different variations of Value Network models, that share information about overall network performance and best practices for serving specialized needs, among hundreds or even thousands of partner companies that make up the network. This creates an intra-network knowledge commons. Some companies also work closely with Open Source Software projects, thereby expanding their "pull" network, and expanding their knowledge commons into a broader Open Commons via Open Source Software project contributions. Thus, "pull" business models also tend to be Network Value-Increasing, and Commons-based business models as well.

"Pull" models can also be platforms for creating "increasing returns dynamics." This is due to "pull" models being based around loose and flexible networks that are already configured to scale as growth occurs. So, growth does not incur the huge overhead costs in administration that "push" models must contend with. Pull platform key characteristics include modular and loosely-coupled networks, open channels that better harness the passion and commitment of innovation communities. "Pull" platforms also will tend to influence public policy with regards to education and innovation, as more companies tend to gravitate towards the "pull" models.

The areas where "push" models tend to succeed in business are in areas where people do not know what they want, and prefer to shop from pre-made selections (Ikea, Home Depot). However, there are even "pull" models to found here, in the form of user-driven innovation, such as mountain biking, extreme skiing, hot rodding, etc. In these pro-amateur niches, customers don't necessarily know what they want, but do want to be a participant in the "pull" network that creates the product.

How do you tax a product that is made in 23 different countries? "Pull" models are going to change the way that governments create policy as more companies gravitate toward them. This will influence laws about intellectual property, education, taxation and more.

"Pull" economies are not just centered around finding creative ways to "outsource/offshore jobs" away from one place and to the places where "labor" is "cheaper". Successful "pull" models have encouraged and aided "insourcing", where more jobs are created, for instance in the United States by "foreign sources (a total of 7 million cited by this paper), than are out sourced (a total of 600,000+ cited by this paper). This is because pull models seek out, not just the "cheapest" labor, but the best ways to add value to the production networks. So, they can scale to many participants around the world, regardless of local labor costs, to find the best participants needed for specific specialized productions.

The social dynamics of "pull" models are highly centered around creating relationships of trust, sharing knowledge, and close cooperation among network participants. In "pull" models, non-market value creation (tacit knowledge, intangible value) is generally steered towards a commons-based model. A commons is used as a "collective governance regime for managing shared resources sustainably and equitably." Many of these commons are made possible by networked information technologies (the internet).

Bollier suggests that "if online commons are going to be useful to business, companies will need to do more work to develop protocols for identity and reputation management". This is because the use of the commons is based around trust. It also due to the need for ways to measure qualitative value in intangible assets beyond money, like knowledge, individual performance and value multiplication, and network wide performance/value multiplication.

Roundtable participants also noted that "pull" models will pose challenges to current education regimes that are centered around training people to participate in "push" economies. One of the participants mentions that " Computers, software tools, and Internet resources make possible some radically new styles of learning. By using pull-based systems, students can function much like businesses in the pull environment: They can access resources they don't control and put themselves into flows of activity, rather than just building inventories of static, objectified "knowledge."

The three schools of thought regarding international cooperation [regimes] - interest-based theories, power-based theories, and knowledge-based theories - provide numerous insights from which it is possible to draw some general findings about cooperation. The basic question the authors examine is how different schools of thought analyze and explain "What accounts for the instances of rule-based cooperation in the international system?"

The following table is presented by the authors (p6):

A regime exists whenever agents cooperate. Formally a regime is the "implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge." Regimes can be both formal and informal, and can include institutions as well as organizations.

Interest-based Theory

Interest-based theories of cooperation focus on the ability of self-interested rational agents to overcome collective action dilemmas, i.e. situations where cooperation avoids suboptimal outcomes for the cooperators. Agents are considered to be rational utility-maximizers with given preferences. Attention is given to the role of regimes/institutions in shaping preferences and facilitating cooperation.

Interest-based theories note the spillover effects of cooperation (functionalism). Because of the costs of creating and maintaining institutions, establishing cooperation in one issue-area can result in solutions that can then be reused in other issue-areas. Cooperation is a result of institutional bargaining (contractualism) and results in negotiated agreements and commitments. Compliance with or defection from negotiated contractual agreements has reputational effects.

There are two primary approaches to interest-based cooperation:

• situation-structural - focuses on the game-theoretic properties of the problem.
• problem-structural - focuses on the issue-area, or topic, of the problem.

Situation-Structural: The situation-structural approach involves "interpreting different kinds of regimes as collective responses to the functional requirements of different kinds of collective action problems" (p 45). Models from game theory - such as Prisoner’s Dilemma, Coordination Game, and Assurance Game - are commonly used. Collaboration requires sanctions and compliance, whereas coordination merely requires agreement. Coordination - such as deciding which side of the road to drive on or allocating the frequency spectrum - is self-enforcing because participants have no incentive to defect. Also, various games have different "second order" dilemmas regarding costs of implementation and enforcement: collaboration is the most costly and the Assurance Game is the least costly.

Problem-Structural: The problem-structural approach involves observing the nature of the issue-area of the problem. In this analysis there are two modes of conflict with different likelihoods of cooperation in each:

• Dissensual conflict
• Conflict about means: when goals are agreed upon but methods are not. The possibility of cooperation is medium.
• Conflict about values: when parties desire different outcomes. The possibility of cooperation is low.
• Consensual conflict
• Relative gains: when your benefit is relative to the benefits of others. The possibility of cooperation is low.
• Absolute gains: when everyone benefits from a solution. The possibility of cooperation is high.

Some factors can aid in the possibility of cooperation. When agents operate under a "veil of uncertainty" regarding benefits and costs, they will often cooperate more readily because there are no known distributive issues to argue over. Exogenous shocks and public crises/outcry can spur cooperation on an issue. The key factor is that the issue-area regarding a given problem must be amenable to a contractual solution in the first place.

Power-based Theories

Power-based theories of cooperation focus on the importance of relative gains and security concerns to otherwise rational agents. The distribution of power and the presence of anarchy (the absence of an authority to enforce contractual obligations) are paramount. Because these concerns never change and are external to the agents involved, power-based theories are predominantly static and positivist.

There are three power-based theories of international cooperation:

• Hegemonic Stability Theory
• Power-based Research Programme
• Realist Theory of Cooperation

Hegemonic Stability Theory

A hegemon is a powerful agent who provides public goods because it has the self-interest and the capacity to supply them. This provision generates free riders. According to hegemonic theory the weak exploit the strong. Hegemony can be coercive (imperialist) or benevolent (leadership).

Hegemons are necessary to shoulder the costs of rulemaking and enforcement (second-order cooperation dilemmas). In return, they generally set the rules and others adjust. Mancur Olson and Duncan Snidal have noted that small groups can provide public goods by cooperating and sharing costs, instead of relying on a single hegemon. In addition, hegemons can vary according to issue-area (the environment, nuclear weapons, etc.)

Power-based Research Programme

According to power-based theories cooperation does not result in mutual adjustment at all but instead requires the less powerful to adjust to the more powerful. In addition, power differences shape the following:

• Who gets to play the game?
• What are the rules?
• What are the payoffs?

Power-based analysis suggests that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is not the best game by which to study cooperation when power is a factor. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma there is one "best" solution and the challenge is for the various agents to arrive at it. By contrast, in Battle of the Sexes, the optimal outcome is different for each player, thus there is fundamental disagreement over what constitutes the "best" solution (mathematically there is no one best solution).

As a result, cooperation and institutions merely serve the interests of the powerful. Powerful players extend their power through these means. Because differences in the distribution of costs and benefits always exist, even under conditions of absolute gains not everyone gains equally. Oran Young has questioned the reliability of assuming that structural power is translatable into bargaining power regarding outcomes.

Realist Theory of Cooperation

The Realist theory of cooperation attempts to explain cooperation given states’ overwhelming concern with security, independence, and autonomy. It is not merely relative gains that are a concern but a systemic intolerance for relative losses. All acts could result in the destruction of the agent, so power asymmetries trump all other concerns. In this scenario, absolute gains just do not exist. There is always the concern over "who will gain more?" The result is "defensive positionalism," or reluctant cooperation, wherein agents will cooperate only if they feel it is absolutely necessary. Rationality, in this case, is constrained by fear of destruction and the presence of anarchy.

For Realists, institutions matter but only because they facilitate the necessary stabilizing exertion of power: payoffs to other agents, sanctions, and norms of reciprocity (that make accepting relative gains losses in the now or on a particular issue easier in expectation of compensation on other issues or in the future). With power, cooperation is rare at best, but without power it is impossible.

Knowledge-based Theories

Interest-based theories of cooperation focus on the ability of self-interested rational agents to overcome collective action dilemmas, i.e. situations where cooperation avoids suboptimal outcomes for the cooperators. Agents are considered to be rational utility-maximizers with given preferences. Attention is given to the role of regimes/institutions in shaping preferences and facilitating cooperation.

Knowledge-based theories (cognitivism) focus on the way in which knowledge - and in particular inter-subjectively shared knowledge and beliefs - shape agents’ behavior and identities. Norms are of major interest to knowledge-based theories.

There are two cognitivist variants:

• "Weak cognitivism" is concerned with the origins of rational actors’ behavior.
• "Strong cognitivism" is concerned with the origins of actors’ understandings of Self and Other.

Weak Cognitivism

Weak cognitivism assumes rational actors but instead of taking preferences as given, problematizes preferences and investigates the origins of agents’ interests, as well as the impact of norms on preference formation.

Weak cognitivism sees itself as complementary to other approaches. The role of knowledge is central, including ideas and learning. Because knowledge is filtered by interpretation, preferences become fluid as knowledge changes. Because knowledge is primary, knowledge-shapers are powerful influences. Epistemic communities inform policy-makers about currently accepted shared understandings, from intersubjectively held ideas to problem definitions and concerns.

Thus the idea landscape acts as a "road map" from which agents choose their routes. Learning is possible and subsequent course-correction as well. Furthermore, the institutionalization of knowledge shapes agents’ preferences. Institutions contribute to consensus through knowledge and information sharing.

Strong Cognitivism

Strong cognitivism, on the other hand, dispenses with rational actors in favor of a sociological model of behavior. Agent’s perceptions of their own and others’ identities and roles are central objects of study. Agents are role-players, not utility maximizers.

Strong cognitivism positions itself as an alternative to other approaches. This "sociological turn" investigates how knowledge and beliefs constitute agents and make possible both power and cooperation. Agents’ very identities exist only by virtue of shared understandings. Groups and institutions define who we are and what behaviors are possible and meaningful. Strong cognitivism stands in opposition to atomistic and positivist attempts to understand cooperation.

Because there is no behavior without prior socialization, strong cognitivism suggests that agents act according to a "logic of appropriateness" rather than a utilitarian "logic of consequences."

For strong cognitivists, sanctions and cost/benefit analysis, i.e. self-interest, is insufficient to explain cooperation. Norms both regulate behavior as well as constitute agent’s identities. This means that norms constrain but also affix meaning to certain actions. An example is a game of chess, wherein the rules must be coherent and accepted before any meaningful moves can be made. As a result, compliance is not the only indicator of cooperation. Strong cognitivists also point to the justifications used by a defecting agent as well as the response of other agents when rules and norms are violated. Generalized norms of cooperation and reciprocity create a web of meaning within which behaviors are contextualized, interpreted, and evaluated.

There are four schools of thought regarding cooperation:

• The power of legitimacy - studies the society of states and its rules.
• The power of arguments - studies communicative rationality.
• The power of identity - studies role-specific understandings of self and other.
• The power of history - studies stabilizing v. critiquing the ‘world order.’

For strong cognitivists, neither human agency nor social structures should be given ontological priority; they share a "codetermined irreducibility."

The power of legitimacy

• States comply with rules seen as legitimate even when it seems not to be in their self-interest.
• For agents in a system, insuring the validity and stability of the system is the first priority.
• Reputation and trust among stakeholders maintain the system.

The power of arguments

• Understanding discourse is essential to understanding cooperation.
• "Strategic action" attempts to control others, whereas "communicative action" attempts to convince them.
• Common understandings are necessary to agree on goals.
• Common understandings provide starting points for discussion.

The power of identity

• Constructivism is the study of socially constructed identities in political science.
• Understanding cooperation among egoists is insufficient to understanding cooperation in general.
• The evolution of cooperation leads to evolution of community.
• Diffuse reciprocity creates cooperation and cost-sharing without direct incentives.
• Cooperation is self-stabilizing when agents who cooperate for selfish interests come to identify themselves as "cooperators."
• Neither social structures nor social identities exist independent of interaction and reproduction (practices).

The power of history

• The current world order is a product of western history and ideology.
• Identities and norms are constructed, but by powerful elites and historical forces.
• These forces are responsible for the dissemination and control of ideas.
• Certain societal actors benefit from prevailing modes of production, accumulation, and dominance.
• ‘Hegemony’ is a set of ideas promulgated by a powerful hegemon in the interest of various elites.
• Cooperation is really collusion designed to reinforce or stabilize the existing world order.
• Elites must compromise to maintain consensus and the stability of the world order.
• Stability requires the marginalization of any radical conceptualizations or alternatives.
• Seeming alternatives take "the existing order as given, as something to be made to work more smoothly, not as something to be criticized and changed."
• Knowledge is always an ideology that works in favor of some groups and not others.

Conclusion

Cooperation is problematic. Whether cooperation is desirable or not, and why, as well as how it can be promoted or prevented depend on various assumption about the nature of agents and their interactions. Nonetheless, it is possible to uncover the processes that foster cooperation within each school of thought.

Internet facilitated tools and practices reached critical mass in the 2004 elections enabling ordinary people to participate in processes that had been closed to them by top-down political organizations.

Old-style political organizations had evolved, abetted by mass media like television, into groups controlled by insiders. The mass participation that peaked in the early part of the 20th century was replaced by an increasingly uninterested, disenfranchised mass and a smaller group of wealthy special interests.

TV took politics away from the grassroots; the Internet could give it back. The people receiving the intended messages could be involved in creating them.

There are varieties of emerging tools in the political ecology: large, top-down organizations like MoveOn.org co-exist with multilayered communities like DailyKos in which peer moderation and rankings lead to the emergence of trusted sources.

Established political parties are behaving like dinosaurs, viewing the new media as tools for more efficiently doing their old work: the Internet is just a new place for a more sophisticated kind of direct mail. They are missing the true significance of the emerging tools and processes. With this attitude, they are likely to become extinct.

Old style, top-down political organizations are afraid of losing control. They are threatened by the dis-intermediation (the removal of middlemen) enabled by the new tools and visible in other commercial domains on the net.

The growth of web based social networking tools and techniques similar to those used to facilitate open source development environments are leading to peer political networks with transparency and accountability.

The Internet currently offers an ecology of interacting and competing groups on both the left and right. These currently range from the traditional party based groups through newer, still top-down groups like MoveOn.org through multilayered communities with peer evaluation and the emergence of trusted users. An example of the latter, DailyKos, has become a very efficient collaboration engine for pooling money for candidates and for rapid fact-checking, news dissemination, and brainstorming.

This evolution is generational. As younger people accustomed to life on the net and the use of social networking tools reach maturity, the replacement of the old ways of doing things will become easier.

Open-source politics is a long way off because of the resistance of the political establishment. In “open source” software development communities, any participant can see, critique, and improve the underlying code. Peer review permits steady improvement. In open-source political groups, planning and implementation of policies would be transparent and open to critique and improvement, an inherent threat to entrenched ego-centric, top-down organizations. However, the old order may have no choice in the matter.

Because of the “digital divide” and the amount of time spent online, Internet facilitated political participation is still largely a white middle- and upper-class phenomenon. Messages tend to circulate through existing social networks. However, this may be generational: younger people are growing up with the tools and shaping them to their needs and desires.

The commonsense view of social evolution as the product of choices made in the marketplace of cultural possibilities resulting in the continuous betterment of the human condition is flawed.

The rise of civilization, paradoxically, reduced the natural limits separating societies. In such a situation, Schmookler's Parable of the Tribes describes how, in a situation in which two or more actors desire to exploit a limited resource, power becomes important and a contaminant of the possibility of peaceful co-existence:

All of a group of tribes living within reach of each other choose peace. However, if all but one choose peace, there are four possibilities for the threatened neighbors:

• Destruction.
• Absorption and enslavement.
• Withdrawal to a less desirable place.
• Imitation of the aggressive behavior.

Technological innovation and “improvement,” far from making things inevitably better, can extend the reach of aggressors throughout the world.

Cultural homogenization and the diminishment of diversity happens both through benign, commonsense choice (i.e., innovations as improvements) as well as through compulsion by dominant aggressors.

Theorists have posited that pure tit-for-tat strategies in iterative prisoners dilemma games were invulnerable. Is this correct? The authors seek to answer this question by examining the ability of various prisoners dilemma gaming strategies to withstand invasion by other competing strategies.

Bender and Swistak examine a gaming strategy universe that includes the strategies:

• Tit for tat - a player will initially cooperate and then in future rounds mimic the behavior of their opponent.
• Tit for 2 Tats - a player will cooperate for the first two rounds and then defect in rounds where their opponent defected in the previous two.
• Suspicious Tit for Tat - a player will initially defect and then will mimic their opponent in future rounds.
• Always Defect
• Always Cooperate
• Grim Trigger - Begin by cooperating, if opponent defects then always defect afterward.

These strategies were examined in pure conditions where only one existed, and then competing strategies were introduced. If a given strategy could withstand incursions by competing strategies it was deemed "stable".

Stability proved to be a continuum. All strategies proved to have points of equilibrium. At this point, a strategy can withstand its maximum level of incursion. That point is that strategy's maximum stability.

Chapter 1, The Problem of Cooperation. Why do people (or other actors) cooperate? "The objective of this enterprise is to develop a theory of cooperation that can be used to discover what is necessary for cooperation to emerge." It uses the Prisoner's Dilemma as a framework for testing theories about balancing self-interest and competition.

"In the Prisoners' Dilemma, the strategy that works best depends directly on what strategy the other player is using and, in particular, on whether this strategy leaves room for the development of mutual cooperation."

Chapter 2, TIT FOR TAT. "The iterated Prisoners' Dilemma has become the E. Coli of social psychology," yet people have not paid much attention to how to play the game well. Axelrod organized a computer tournament to which people familiar with PD submitted programs encoding different strategies. The winner was one of the simplest, TIT FOR TAT.

Axelrod then constructed an environment in which different programs competed, and the losing programs were eliminated: this was an ecology that rewarded high scoring programs, and punished others. "This process simulates survival of the fittest. A rule that is successful on average with the current distribution of rules in the population will become an even larger proportion of the environment of the other rules in the next generation. At first, a rule that is successful with all sorts of rules will proliferate, but later as the unsuccessful rules disappear, success requires good performance with other successful rules." In other words, the competition gets tougher.

"The analysis of the tournament results indicate that there is a lot to be learned about coping in an environment of mutual power. Even expert strategists from political science, sociology, economics, psychology, and mathematics made the systematic errors of being too competitive for their own good, not being forgiving enough, and being too pessimistic about the responsiveness of the other side."

The tournaments reveal that "there is a single property which distinguishes the relatively high-scoring entries from the relatively low-scoring entries. This is the property of being nice, which is to say never being the first to defect."

TIT FOR TAT's rules for success:

• Be nice. Don't be the first to go on the attack. This demonstrates good will, and avoids provoking others.
• Retaliate. If others attack, retaliate. Not doing so encourages bad behavior and gives niceness a bad reputation.
• Be forgiving. If others defect but then go back to cooperating, accept the opportunity to move back to a cooperative mode.
• Be clear. Others can predict what you'll do, be certain that their moves will have definite outcomes. "There is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated PD. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterate PD, you benefit from the other player's cooperation."

Chapter 4, Trench Warfare. During World War I, "live and let live" arrangements emerged spontaneously between opposing units on the Western Front. Cooperation could take hold because "the same small units faced each other in immobile sectors for extended periods of time." Consequently, they had a more sustained relationship than in mobile warfare, and could develop commonly-understood rules, reciprocity and restraint in attacks, displays of strength (e.g., snipers shooting at hard targets)as well as ethics (recognition that there was an arrangement and violating it was immoral) and rituals (e.g., regular artillery firing).

"Cooperation first emerged spontaneously in a variety of contexts, such as restraint in attacking the distribution of enemy rations, a pause during the first Christmas in the trenches, and a slow resumption of fighting after bad weather made sustained combat almost impossible. These restraints quickly evolved into clear patterns of mutually understood behavior, such as two-for-one or three-for-one retaliation for actions that were taken to be unacceptable."

Chapter 6, How to Choose Effectively. Four suggestions about how to do well in PD:

• Don't be envious. In a PD, "envy is self-destructive. Asking how well you are doing compared to how well the other player is doing is not a good standard unless your goal is to destroy the other player." However, in an iterated prisoner's dilemma, you can't do better than the other player, unless they're always suckers. "In a non-zero-sum world you do not have to do better than the other player to do well for yourself. The other's success is virtually a prerequisite of your doing well for yourself."
• Don't be the first to defect (be nice). "It pays to cooperate as long as the other player is cooperating." In a short game, defection can make sense; but in a relationship, taking advantage of the other person is self-defeating.
• Reciprocate both cooperation and defection. TIT FOR TAT "does not destroy the basis of its own success. On the contrary, it thrives on interactions with other successful rules." However, the right level of forgiveness depends on the context, and the other players' strategies.
• Don't be too clever. "In a zero-sum game, such as chess it pays for us to be as sophisticated and as complex in our analysis as we can. Non-zero-sum games are not like this. The other player can respond to your own choices. And unlike the chess opponent, the other player in a PD should not be regarded as someone who is out to defeat you." "There is an important contrast between a zero-sum game like chess and a non-zero-sum game like the iterated PD. In chess, it is useful to keep the other player guessing about your intentions. The more the other player is in doubt, the less efficient will be his or her strategy. But in a non-zero-sum setting it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterate PD, you benefit from the other player's cooperation."

Chapter 7, How to Promote Cooperation. Promoting cooperation can be thought of as an exercise in tinkering with the variables in a PD. "As long as the interaction is not iterated, cooperation is very difficult. That is why an important way to promote cooperation is to arrange that the same two individuals will meet each other again, be able to recognize each other from the past, and to recall how the other has behaved until now."

• Enlarge the shadow of the future. For cooperation to emerge, players must be in a continuing relationship, with the expectation that it will continue in the future. "Mutual cooperation can be stable if the future is sufficiently important relative to the past." "There are two basic ways of doing this: by making the interactions more durable, and by making them more frequent. [P]rolonged interaction allows patterns of cooperation which are based on reciprocity to be worth trying and allows them to become established," Making interactions more frequent makes "the next interaction occur sooner, and hence the next move looms larger than it otherwise would." You might do this by enforcing isolation, or constructing hierarchies or organizations, which are "especially effective at concentrating the interactions between specific individuals."
• Change the payoffs. Make defection less attractive, by enforcing laws, or growing the value of long-term incentives.
• Teach people to care about each other.
• Teach reciprocity. Reciprocity "actually helps not only oneself, but others as well. It helps others by making it hard for exploitative strategies to survive."
• Improve recognition abilities. "The ability to recognize the other player from past interactions, and to remember the relevant features of those interactions, is necessary to sustain cooperation. Without these abilities, a player could not use any form of reciprocity and hence could not encourage the other to cooperate."

Chapter 8, The Social Structure of Cooperation.
The social structure of cooperation involves labels, reputation, regulation, and territoriality.

• Labels are fixed characteristics of an agent that are observable by other agents. Labels affect reciprocity and retaliation via assumptions of group similarity and stereotypes.
• Reputation is others' belief about the strategies an agent will employ. Reputation may be based on past behavior or on rumours, i.e. reputation can be accurate or merely believed. Reputation affects whether or not other agents will cooperate or defect with you.
• Regulation involves setting the stringency of a standard of behavior "high enough to get most of the social benefits of regulation, and not so high as to prevent the evolution of a stable pattern of voluntary compliance from almost all of the companies" (or regulated agents).
• Territoriality refers to both physical and conceptual spaces that can be 'invaded' by agents of differing strategies. Territoriality establishes boundaries within which behaviors will be reinforced or retaliated against depending on prevailing norms. Also, the boundary provides an 'inside' for agents that comply with the norms, and an 'outside' to which they can be expelled if they do not comply.

Chapter 9, The Robustness of Reciprocity.

• Cooperation can get started by even a small cluster of individuals who are willing to reciprocate cooperation, even in a world where no one else will cooperate.
• Once cooperation is establish, it protects itself from invasion by non-cooperative strategies.
• The foundation of cooperation is the durability of the relationship, which allows agents to learn about each other in order to cooperate.

Technology, history, and social impacts of technology are most often framed in terms of hardware, software, and finance, but communication technologies have the potential to change the way people think, communicate, and organize social groups. These impacts are sometimes framed by Moore's law (microprocessors and chips grow more powerful and less expensive over time), Metcalfe's law (the value of a technical network grows as the square of the number of nodes grows) and Reed's Law (when technical networks enable people to form social groups, the value of the network grows as two raised to the power of the number of nodes - much faster than just the rate of growth of technical networks). The group-formation enabled by the Internet makes it possible for people who don't know each other and who are located in different parts of the world to connect with each other in regard to shared interests - economic, social, cultural, and political. When communication technology enables people to organize collective action in these spheres, civilizations change. Now that the power of computing and communication has untethered from the desktop and leaped into billions of pockets, the forms of collective action are erupting in places and spheres of life where computation and communication had never reached before.

At the point where billions of people have access to personal communications and the instant information that the Internet provides, the aspects of cooperation and collective action discussed by Axelrod, Ostrom, and others comes into play - the capabilities of the emerging mobile mediasphere enable forms of collective action that were not possible before.

Moore's law means that the quantitative capabilities of chip-based devices grow so quickly that they translate into qualitative changes over periods of decades; today, billions of people carry devices that are thousands of times more powerful than the first personal computers, and cost a fraction of the price. At the same time, the users of these devices discover and exploit communication capabilities, social potential, political leverage, economic opportunities that were not dreamed of by those who designed, manufactured and sold the technologies. The technologies that make smart mobs possible are in the earliest stages of development, similar to the state of the personal computer in 1980 and the Internet in 1990. Yet the political demonstrations and electoral leverage that manifested in the Philippines, Korea, Spain, the USA and elsewhere - deposing governments and electing others - show the potentially disruptive power of smart mobs, even in their earliest stages.

At the same time, primitive ad-hoc computation collectives such as SETI@home and folding@home indicate new forms of computing emerging from the collective, voluntary efforts of millions of computer users. And GPS chips add the power of location-based services to the mix: people are mobilizing social networks and information in the immediate time and space.

Economically, the ability to gain profit by sharing with others, rather than only by competing - as manifested by Amazon, Google, eBay, open source software and other enterprises - is making a new kind of economic enterprise possible. Commerce is ancient, markets are as old as the crossroads, but capitalism is only about 500 years old, enabled by technologies such as joint stock ownership companies, shared liability insurance organizations, double entry bookkeeping. Now, the peer production methods exhibited by open source communities and other enterprises hint that humans have not stopped inventing new forms of economic collective action.

Six Degrees begins in the beginning. Stanley Milgram's initial small world studies are analyzed. His findings in seeing if a group of people in Nebraska can get a letter to someone in Massachusetts are scrutinized. Milgram left a puzzle. Mathematically, six degrees of separation can be shown and intuitively it is appealing. But do social networks actually work that way?

Initially, Watts steps into the world of pure mathematic theory. Graph theory and random graphs are employed to build potential worlds in which connections can be made. These tools are detailed and their histories explained.

Watts and his colleagues then take the science to new levels, by introducing sociology, epidemiology, economics, and business models into this new multi-disciplinary science. Immediately, each new field of study brings with it new insights into network dynamics.

This convergence of disciplines reveals the social, transportation and technological networks that make up our world. These networks are, ultimately, made up of individuals. Individuals in turn relate back to the networks and define how they operate.

Socially, people relate to their network by clustering. Clusters are logical organizations of network elements. In a social context, we might cluster in terms of a religion, a favorite author, a school we are attending or an affinity for a type of food. Some of these have very close physical distance, while others have a social distance with members spread out over a large area.

Networks of this type are, to various extents, “scale-free” networks. If graphed these networks roughly follow a classic power law trend where the level of connectivity between two nodes in a network increases dramatically as more nodes are connected. Real-world scale-free networks tend to have highly connected hubs which rapidly, purposely, and efficiently transmit pertinent or pervasive content from one location to another. In social circles, these are networkers. In the airline network these are hub airports. In traffic they would be freeway interchanges.

Due to this architecture, the Internet and modern air transport have combined to greatly decrease the role of proximity in our social networks. This has had great impacts on commerce, tourism, cultural sensitivity and other social factors. However, it has also led to great risks in the transmission of diseases, sensitivity to distant economic fluctuations, and rapid spread of misinformation.

These dynamics create a type of network that Duncan calls simultaneously robust and vulnerable. Their strength and weakness is that, with rapid transmission from cluster to cluster, anything can move quickly from one location or group to another. He uses the example of Toyota, whose network of suppliers was organized in such a way as to quickly compensate for and recover from a potential economic catastrophe.

Stable scale-free networks do not rely on a rigid hierarchy to provide direction in times of crisis. Rather, the structure of the network itself can rapidly respond to an unforeseen situation.

Their network was arranged in such a way as to foster and reward communication. This communication helped cope with ambiguous or unplanned situations. Rather than paralyzing Toyota while people waited for a decision from a rigid hierarchy, the contractors in the network were able to analyze the calamity and provide a rapid response to it.

As mentioned above, this robustness also rapidly transmits malicious content as well. The Melissa Virus, SARS and Ebola are analyzed to show why the network did or did not transmit them and, when it did, how they eventually died out.

Watts ends this book by summarizing that the multidimensional nature of social distance is sometimes counterintuitive and subjective. People can feel close in a network sense to people they are physically distant from and, conversely, socially distant from people physically nearby.

He continues by warning that social and physical distances have shrunk. People can quickly travel from place to place and economies are highly interdependent. The sheer number of dependencies in the modern world may yield surprising results from seemingly insignificant actions.

He finishes by showing the stability of our networks with the example of how New York adapted to the 9-11 attacks. The City bounced back to semi-normal operations within a week. During the disaster, the best laid plans of emergency operations staff were scuttled by the utter unavailability of facilities and services designed to copy with disasters. The network will provide.