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Co-evolutionary gaming

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I have enclosed an article concerned with co-evolutionary gaming, and attached the questions with a diagram of the Jo-Hari window.

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The expert examines co-evolutionary gaming.

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Please see the attached file.

Ursula - this is very complex and involved. This is because it deals with warfare, biology and economic competition as manifestations of the same underlying conflict.
Please, message me if you have questions.

Questions:
1. How can co-evolutionary gaming facilitate group decision-making?
2. What are its limitations?
(these two questions are dealt with together in the information below. It is based on two parts: the first, the literature in the field in figuring out exactly what co-evolution means in different contexts. The second concerns the diagram and a real world example of how it can be used.

PART I:

I think we're going to need some outside sources here.
Here is an excellent academic source:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0910.0826v1.pdf
Start with page 5.
I'm going to try to make this very complex subject as simple as I can.
The point here is that cooperation makes rational sense given the extreme levels of uncertainty involved in certain situations (like the paper says, warfare or macroeconomics). The number of possible outcomes is huge.
The next point is that things change. As strategies are developed and implemented, the response of the system also changes, often in unpredictable ways. Keep in mind that this also changes the nature of the teams involved in these decisions. They might change their views of the game, their opponents, and, importantly, each other as the scenario that they're working on changes.

Here's a key quote from page 6 (paper above):
"From this point of view it is straightforward to establish that defector-defector links are short-lived if compared to cooperator-cooperator links since the former are not beneficial for neither of the two involved players, while the later yield mutual gains for both. The second set of co-evolutionary rules evaluates the payoffs originating from the investigated link prior to its potential deletion, while the actual removal takes place only if a new neighbor may yield higher benefits (type B) (Van Segbroeck et al., 2009).And finally, the third set of co-evolutionary rules considers the strategy adoption process as pivotal for deciding which links to delete and which to keep (typeC)."

What the heck does this mean?
1. The first one is straightforward - it says that, in games of extreme uncertainty, defection from the team makes little sense unless you're going to a team that is doing very well. The fact is that, no matter what, extreme uncertainty forces cooperation to a high degree.
2. The second is more abstract. A member of a team looks at the decision that has been made. She looks at it critically, and might move to another team if the decision turns out to be wrong. It is important to note that she remains cooperative, just with a different bunch of people.
3. The third is process-related. The issue here is that, to the extent that strategy is full and complete, the chances of defection are reduced (look at page 9). The issue is whether or not the method of adopting strategy is serious enough to warrant continued cooperation. Importantly, in this case, success is not the criterion - the rationality of the process is what keeps the teams together and cooperating.

Yet, we're not quite at the stage of co-evolution.

Here's another academic paper:

Co-evolutionary Dynamics Within and Between
Firms: From Evolution to Co-evolution
Henk W. Volberda and Arie Y. Lewin
Journal of Management Studies 40:8 December 2003
(this is available for free online, but the link is too large to include here).

This is an important paper for our topic.
It deals with business, and begins with the idea that management might a) not be planning for the long term or b) might just be set in their ways. These are errors that can drive a firm out of business. These are errors that can be overcome through co-evolutionary decisions.

Co-evolution is about mutual adaptation and change. It's not a simple model of cause and effect, but a dialectical model of action x leading to dozens or hundreds of reactions both from external actors and from the teams operating on your side. (see page 2114)

Here's an important quote from page 2128:

"In conclusion, we conjecture that managing internal rates of change to match
or exceed external rates of change, nurturing and maintaining self-organization
and sustaining concurrent ...

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