Experiments like the Ultimatum Game and the Public Goods Game (one shot games for real money divided among strangers) that have been conducted in different countries all over the world have shown that group behavior frequently does not fit the traditional model of self-interested actors, that it is too richly varied between cultures to support a universal sense of fairness, and that a higher degree of market integration and higher payoffs to cooperation can be linked to greater levels of prosocial behavior.
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).
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.
The authors propose a market-based methodology, that accounts for public information, for predicting future outcomes using a small number of individuals participating in an imperfect information market and they verify the method demonstrating that predictions outperform the market and the best predictor in the group of participants.
Eric Raymond compares two styles of software development using his own experience as illustration -- the traditional top-down (Cathedral) approach and the bottom-up (Bazaar) approach -- and points out how Internet-enabled cooperation makes the Bazaar approach highly efficient for the right tasks.
Rational, self-interested individuals in large groups need a positive incentive or negative sanction delivered through institutional arrangements in order to provide themselves a collective good; in small groups the collective good itself can be incentive enough for individuals to cooperate.
Frameworks, composed of theories that are in turn composed of varying models need to be developed to study and make predictions about the complex behaviors that take place in social situations.
James Surowiecki argues that with the proper structure and characteristics, large groups of ordinary people can outperform small groups of experts in making decisions and predictions.
