Gregory Todd Jones.
  home   about   CV   research   lab   publications   blog   ssrn   software   courses   consulting   library   links

My research focuses broadly on negotiation and conflict resolution from a variety of intellectual viewpoints informed largely by behavioral economics, evolutionary game theory, and computational models of social systems. Primary project areas are summarized below with links to selected papers, simulations, software, data, and other resources.

The Evolution of Cooperation in Social Networks. Cooperation has played a key role in the evolution of various species, from single-celled organisms without any cognitive capacity whatsoever, to diverse species of birds and fish, from non-human primates such as chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys to humans, where the role of cooperation may have been most evolutionarily significant. Arriving at a coherent understanding of how cooperation can evolve in the face of self-regarding agents remains one of the most formidable challenges to those that study the management of conflict. At the same time, the study of network theory, complex systems, and nonlinear dynamics has pervaded all of science. Indeed, E. O. Wilson, who once characterized the evolution of cooperation as one of the greatest challenges for modern biology, more recently made a more emphatic appeal for research on complex systems. And yet, remarkably little work has been done that investigates the evolution of cooperation using network theory and the tools of complex systems analysis. Our work seeks to make contributions at the intersection of these two important areas of study.


 

Reciprocity Emerging. Random network of 200 agents constructed with connection probability, p = .01. Agents are sized proportional to degree. After 5 generations of 10 PD games with deterministic imitation, reciprocating strategies (yellow agents) are emerging towards population dominance.

Selected Publications

Gregory Todd Jones, A NetLogo model for the Study of the Evolution of Cooperation in Social Networks , North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science, Atlanta, GA (2007).

Gregory Todd Jones, Hybrid Computational Models for the Mediated Negotiation of Complex Contracts, North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science, Notre Dame, IN (2006).

 Reidar Hagtvedt & Gregory Todd Jones, Show Me Your Friends and I'll Tell You Who You Are: A Computational Model of Reputation by Association in Non-iterated Social Dilemmas, North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science, Notre Dame, IN (2006).

 

The Biology of Conflict and Cooperation. Across disciplines, the study of conflict and cooperation tends to be rather anthropomorphic - cooperative behavior is often viewed to be the cognitive province of humans alone with the meager efforts of non-human species being attributed to mere instinct. And yet, the intellectual scaffolding that we have used to understand Homo economicus, the perfectly rational man, fails to explain the emergence of cooperation. In this work, partially funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we have cast a wide interdisciplinary net, bringing together economists, evolutionary psychologists, biologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, sociologists, neuroscientists, and others to help us understand the commonalities related to cooperative behavior that may be genetically shared by all living things.

 

 

Dictyostelium discoideum. Single-celled slime mold fruiting bodies produced by altruistic, cooperative behavior triggered when food supplies become scarce. Courtesy Michael Schleicher, LMU Müchen.

Selected Publications

Gregory Todd Jones & Reidar Hagtvedt, Marketing in Heterozygous Advantage, The Journal of Business Ethics (forthcoming, 2007). 

Douglas H. Yarn & Gregory Todd Jones, Negotiation is in Our Bones (or Brains): Behavioral Biology as a Basis for Understanding, in The Negotiator’s Fieldbook 283 (American Bar Association Section on Dispute Resolution, 2006).

 

Empirical Legal Studies. The empirical study of legal systems seeks to empahsize observation, experiment, and statistical control in order to develop both descriptive knowledge and prescriptive guidance to influence the legal academy, the bench, the bar, and those that make policy. The importance of emerging empirical scholarship in the legal academy is evidenced by the recent 2006 American Association of Law Schools' Annual Meeting devoted to the area and the prominance of a number of scholarly journals dedicated to the area, many of which are peer reviewed. Our work seeks to contribute to the body of scholarly research in this field, the methods employed to conduct this research, and the application of this research.

 

Selected Publications

Karen Barton, Clark Cunningham, Gregory Todd Jones & Paul Maharg, Valuing What Clients Think: Standardized Clients and the Assessment of Communicative Competence, 13 Clinical Law Review 1 (2006).

Wendy F. Hensel & Gregory Todd Jones, Bridging the Physical – Mental Gap: An Empirical Assessment of the Success Rates of Plaintiffs with Mental Illness in Establishing a Protected Disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, 73 Tennessee Law Review 47 (2005). 

John J. Dyer & Gregory Todd Jones, Judicial Treatment of Charitable Donations in Bankruptcy Before and After the Religious Liberty and Charitable Contribution Protection Act of 1998, 2 DePaul Business & Commercial Law Journal 265 (2004). 

Gregory Todd Jones, Testing for Structural Change in Legal Doctrine: An Empirical Look at the Plaintiff’s Decision to Litigate Employment Discrimination Disputes a Decade After the Civil Rights Act of 1991, 18 Georgia State University Law Review 997 (2002). 

Gregory Todd Jones & Reidar Hagtvedt, Sample Data as Evidence: Meeting the Requirements of Daubert and the Recently Amended Federal Rules of Evidence, 18 Georgia State University Law Review715 (2002) (Extensively cited by the Rhode Island Supreme Court in Garden City Treatment Center, Inc. v. Coordinated Health Partners, Inc., 852 A.2d 535 (R.I. 2004)). 

 

Simulation in Pedagogy and Public Policy.

 

Selected Publications

Gregory Todd Jones, Agent-Based Modeling for Public Health: Use with Necessary Caution, The American Journal of Public Health (forthcoming, 2007) (model replication and critique). 

Reidar Hagtvedt, Gregory Todd Jones & Kari Jones, Illustrating Confidence Intervals using Simulation, Teaching Statistics (forthcoming, 2007) (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society’s Teaching Statistics Trust) (with software, VisualConfidenceIntervals: A PC-Based Visualization Tool For Learning About Confidence Intervals). 

Reidar Hagtvedt, Gregory Todd Jones & Kari Jones, Pedagogical Simulation of Sampling Distributions and the Central Limit Theorem, Teaching Statistics (forthcoming, 2007) (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society’s Teaching Statistics Trust) (with software, VisualSamplingDistribution: A PC-Based Visualization Tool For Learning About Sampling Distributions and the Central Limit Theorem). 

Reidar Hagtvedt, Gregory Todd Jones, Stefan Gaertner & Rodger W. Griffeth, Dynamic Systems in Human Resource Management: Chaos Theory & Employee Turnover, in Innovative Theory and Empirical Research on Employee Turnover 189 (Vol. 2, Research in Human Resources Management, Information Age Publishing, 2004).

Gregory Todd Jones, Reidar Hagtvedt & Kari Jones, A VBA-Based Simulation for Teaching Simple Linear Regression, 26 Teaching Statistics 36 (2004) (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society’s Teaching Statistics Trust) (with software, VisualRegression: A PC-Based Visualization Tool For Learning Univariate Regression).

 

Mechanisms and Institutions for Conflict Resolution.

 

Selected Publications

Douglas H. Yarn & Gregory Todd Jones, Alternative Dispute Resolution: Practice and Procedure in Georgia (Thomson West, 2006) (with Supplements, 2007).

David Sally & Gregory Todd Jones, Game Theory Behaves, in The Negotiator’s Fieldbook 87 (American Bar Association Section on Dispute Resolution, 2006).  

Joan T. A. Gabel, Nancy Mansfield & Gregory Todd Jones, The Peculiar Moral Hazard of Employment Practices Liability Insurance: Realignment of the Incentive to Transfer Risk with the Incentive to Prevent Discrimination, 20 Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics & Public Policy 639 (2006). 

Gregory Todd Jones, Trust, Institutionalization, & Corporate Reputations: Public Independent Fact-Finding from a Risk Management Perspective, 13 University of Miami Business Law Review 121 (2005). 

Gregory Todd Jones & Douglas H. Yarn, Evaluative Dispute Resolution Under Uncertainty: An Empirical Look at Bayes’ Theorem and the Expected Value of Perfect Information, 2003 Journal of Dispute Resolution 427 (2003) (University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law). 

Gregory Todd Jones, Fighting Capitulation: A Research Agenda for the Future of Dispute Resolution, 108 Penn State Law Review 277 (2003). 

Gregory Todd Jones, Toward an Integrated Practice of Behavioral Conflict Management, International Association for Conflict Management, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (2003).

 

© Copyright 2008, Gregory Todd Jones, All Rights Reserved.