His work has explored how strategies compete. His work has developed to new levels recently by incorporating work with complex adaptive systems models in conjunction with the Santa Fe Institute. The issue of concern is how single elements which are themselves adaptive can succeed in an environment of other adaptive beings. His findings indicate that if there is no view that current action will have future consequences to other participants and hence back to oneself in the future, then aggression and destructive competition will pay. Within this framework, competition is still going strong but the nature of viable competition changes.
Strategies compete with each other in a very impersonal way.
That is, the strategies themselves must be adaptive and emergent if they are to succeed in a world of other adaptive strategies. In the current era of change, one of the main features of strategies is that they be emergent. That is, a strategy is no longer a matter of analysing the past trends and projecting them into the future. The nature of analysis has changed. The nature of projection has changed.