Education
Taylor completed his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom.
Taylor completed his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom.
His research interests include rational choice theory, moral motivation and game theory. He has taught at Essex and at Yale University and was previously Visiting Professor or Fellow has held visiting positions at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, the European University Institute in Florence, and at the Australian National University in Canberra. Game theory was applied in social sciences before Taylor"s work, which propose a theory for a rationally motivated cooperation, that is, cooperation that maximizes utility.
Taylor explains the game of chicken, in which cooperation is a Nash equilibrium, and notes that it is often mistaken for a prisoners dilemma, in which cooperation is dominated by selfish strategies.
Following analyses by the mathematician Stephen Smale and experiments by the political scientist Robert Axelrod, Taylor has argued that spontanteous cooperation emerges in repeated prisoners" dilemmas.
