A TOURNAMENT OF PARTY STRATEGIES

James H. Fowler
University of California, Davis

Michael Laver
New York University

In the spirit of Robert Axelrod’s tournament for strategies in the repeat-
play prisoner’s dilemma game, we announce a tournament for party
strategies in a dynamic agent-based spatial model of party competition.

The winner will receive $1000.

We herewith call for submissions of party strategies by 15 April 2006.
Each strategy submitted will be pitted against each other strategy in a
series of long-running simulations of a two-dimensional multiparty
spatial model in which the number of parties is endogenously determined.
All parties falling below a certain size threshold for two consecutive
elections will “die”. One new party will be “born” each election at a
random spatial location, using a strategy randomly selected (with
replacement) from the portfolio of submitted strategies. The strategy
most successful at winning votes over the very long run will be declared
the “winner”.

A full version of the rules is available at
http://jhfowler.ucdavis.edu/tournament.htm

PLEASE NOTE: Submissions are NOT required to be in R (but they must be
specified well enouigh that we can program them).  Anyone may submit,
including individuals outside the field of political science.

Best,
james and mik

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