"The Cooperation Theory that is presented in this book is based upon an investigation of individuals who pursue their own self-interest without the aid of a central authority to force them to cooperate with each other. The reason for assuming self-interest is that it allows an examination of the difficult case in which cooperation is not completely based upon a concern for others or upon the welfare of the group as a whole. It must, however, be stressed that this assumption is actually much less restrictive than it appears."

“So in a non-zero-sum world you do not have to do better than the other player to do well for yourself. This is especially true when you are interacting with many different players. Letting each of them do the same or a little better than you is fine, as long as you tend to do well yourself. There is no point in being envious of the success of the other player, since in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma of long duration the other's success is virtually a prerequisite of your doing well for yourself.”

“Aggregation means the organization of elements of a system into patterns that tend to put highly compatible elements together and less compatible elements apart. Landscape theory predicts how aggregation will lead to alignments among actors , whose leaders are myopic in their assessments and incremental in their actions. The predicted configurations are based upon the attempts of actors to minimize their frustration based upon their pairwise propensities to align with some actors and oppose others. These attempts lead to a local minimum in the energy landscape of the entire system. The theory is supported by the results of the alignment of seventeen European nations in the Second World War. The theory has potential for application to coalitions of business firms, political parties in parliaments, social networks, social cleavages in democracies, and organizational structures.”

“Will there be anyone out there to reciprocate one's own initial cooperation? In some circumstances this will be hard to tell in advance. But if there has been enough time for many different strategies to be tried, and for some way of making the more successful strategies become more common, then one can be fairly confident that there will be individuals out there who will reciprocate cooperation. The reason is that even a relatively small cluster of discriminating nice rules can invade a population of meanies, and then thrive on their good scores with each other. And once nice rules get a foothold they can protect themselves from reinvasion by meanies.”

“Throughout the social sciences today, the dominant form of modeling is based upon the rational-choice paradigm. Game theory, in particular, is typically based upon the assumption of rational choice. In my view, the reason for the dominance of the rational-choice approach is not that scholars think it is realistic. Nor is game theory used solely because it offers good advice to a decision maker, because its unrealistic assumptions undermine much of its value as a basis for advice.”

“In this chapter Darwin's emphasis on individual advantage has been formalized in terms of game theory. This formulation establishes conditions under which cooperation in biological systems based on reciprocity can evolve even without foresight by the participants.”

“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.”