Primate Cooperation
With a PhD titled "Cooperation and economic behaviour in vervet monkeys" I studied cooperation dynamics among multiple individuals of vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops) in Loskop Dam Nature Reserve, South Africa..
When social organisms clump together, they tend to cooperate if this is beneficial to their fitness. Yet to date little attention has been paid to the social setting in which cooperation naturally occurs. I set up a feeding experiment and I tested whether the monkeys discriminately chose each other to form cooperative partners. I found that they did so and they further segregated their relatively despotic society.
I also embedded economics theories into this once called sociobiology, following the principle that animals can trade resources or social behaviours leading to the formation of a competitive market system (biological market).
The results have been published in PLoS ONE, in the Journal of Bioeconomics, and, in the near future, in an Economics journal. Here is a talk I gave of it.