Ross Hammond

Seeing Around Corners: Ethnocentric Behavior and Altruism
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI



Ross Hammond became an IDEAS-IGERT Fellow in January 2003 as one of the first recipients of the fellowship. He is a PhD student in the Dept. of Political Science and is collaborating with Prof. Robert Axelrod on a project that models ethnocentric behavior and altruism.

In 1999, Ross received his Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors from Williams College. He majored in Economics and Political Science. His Honors thesis in Economics, titled ''Studying Corruption Using Agent-Based Computer Modeling'' was published by the Brookings Institution as CSED Working Paper No. 19 in December 2000. Ross' model of corruption was also featured in the April 2002 issue of the Atlantic Monthly in a lead article called ''Seeing Around Corners,'' available at www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200204/rauch

In addition to his work with Prof. Axelrod, Ross's ongoing research on corruption has currently led him to work with the director of a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Romania whose mission is to fight corruption in Eastern Europe. The policy strategies outlined in Ross' paper have become a centerpiece of the NGO's efforts and the organization is implementing several ideas discussed in Ross' research.

Although still an early-career professional, Ross has published extensively in academic journals. An article he co-authored with Joshua Epstein, ''Non-Explanatory Equilibria: An Extremely Simple Game With (Mostly) Unattainable Fixed Points'' was published in 2002 in the journal Complexity. More recently, Ross co-authored a paper with Tim Gulden called ''An Agent-Based Model of City Size Distribution'' that will be published as a forthcoming Brooking Institution Working Paper. The central results of this paper are discussed in a recent book called The Siberian Curse by Russia scholars Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy (Brookings Press, 2003). Ross presented one of several papers resulting from his collaboration with Prof. Axelrod at last year's Midwest Political Science Organization conference (''The Evolution of Ethnocentric Behavior'', available online at: www.umich.edu/~axe/research'). A second, related paper from their collaboration, co-authored with Oxford zoologist Alan Grafen, is forthcoming in the journal Evolution (''Altruism via kin-selection strategies that rely on arbitrary tags with which they co-evolve'').

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