scholarly journals Shame and honour drive cooperation

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 899-901 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Jacquet ◽  
Christoph Hauert ◽  
Arne Traulsen ◽  
Manfred Milinski
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Tragedy Of The Commons ◽  
Experimental Paradigm ◽  
The Public ◽  
Common Resources ◽  
Public Goods Experiments ◽  
The Commons

Can the threat of being shamed or the prospect of being honoured lead to greater cooperation? We test this hypothesis with anonymous six-player public goods experiments, an experimental paradigm used to investigate problems related to overusing common resources. We instructed the players that the two individuals who were least generous after 10 rounds would be exposed to the group. As the natural antithesis, we also test the effects of honour by revealing the identities of the two players who were most generous. The non-monetary, reputational effects induced by shame and honour each led to approximately 50 per cent higher donations to the public good when compared with the control, demonstrating that both shame and honour can drive cooperation and can help alleviate the tragedy of the commons.

scholarly journals The evolution of anti-social rewarding and its countermeasures in public goods games

2015 ◽  
Vol 282 (1798) ◽  
pp. 20141994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel dos Santos
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Additional Condition ◽  
Social Dilemmas ◽  
Second Order ◽  
The Public ◽  
Common Pool ◽  
Public Goods Games ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Social Trap

Cooperation in joint enterprises can easily break down when self-interests are in conflict with collective benefits, causing a tragedy of the commons. In such social dilemmas, the possibility for contributors to invest in a common pool-rewards fund, which will be shared exclusively among contributors, can be powerful for averting the tragedy, as long as the second-order dilemma (i.e. withdrawing contribution to reward funds) can be overcome (e.g. with second-order sanctions). However, the present paper reveals the vulnerability of such pool-rewarding mechanisms to the presence of reward funds raised by defectors and shared among them (i.e. anti-social rewarding), as it causes a cooperation breakdown, even when second-order sanctions are possible. I demonstrate that escaping this social trap requires the additional condition that coalitions of defectors fare poorly compared with pro-socials, with either (i) better rewarding abilities for the latter or (ii) reward funds that are contingent upon the public good produced beforehand, allowing groups of contributors to invest more in reward funds than groups of defectors. These results suggest that the establishment of cooperation through a collective positive incentive mechanism is highly vulnerable to anti-social rewarding and requires additional countermeasures to act in combination with second-order sanctions.

The Source and Significance of Confusion in Public Goods Experiments

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J Ferraro ◽  
Christian A Vossler
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Game Form ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Goods Experiments ◽  
Experimental Parameters ◽  
Other Regarding ◽  
Other Regarding Preferences ◽  
Design Experiments

Abstract Economists use public goods experiments to develop and test theories of individual preferences and institutional design. Previous work demonstrates many participants in public goods experiments contribute to the public good out of confusion. We design experiments to provide insights on the consequences and causes of confusion. We establish that confusion amounts to more than statistical noise and does not dissipate with repetition (i.e. learning). Confused subjects use experimental parameters and the behavior of other players as cues, which confounds treatment effects and traditional strategies to identify other-regarding preferences through exogenous parameter changes and the modeling of reactions to other subjects’ decisions. We argue that confusion stems from an inaccurate understanding of game incentives (“failure of game form recognition”), which is a consequence of the framing and inadequate payoff information in standard instructions. Modified instructions can substantially reduce confusion, and, in turn, change the distribution of contributions to the public good.

scholarly journals Evolution in group-structured populations can resolve the tragedy of the commons

2006 ◽  
Vol 273 (1593) ◽  
pp. 1477-1481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Killingback ◽  
Jonas Bieri ◽  
Thomas Flatt
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Social Dilemma ◽  
Tragedy Of The Commons ◽  
Structured Populations ◽  
Indirect Reciprocity ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Animal Societies ◽  
Trait Group

Public goods are the key features of all human societies and are also important in many animal societies. Collaborative hunting and collective defence are but two examples of public goods that have played a crucial role in the development of human societies and still play an important role in many animal societies. Public goods allow societies composed largely of cooperators to outperform societies composed mainly of non-cooperators. However, public goods also provide an incentive for individuals to be selfish by benefiting from the public good without contributing to it. This is the essential paradox of cooperation—known variously as the Tragedy of the Commons, Multi-person Prisoner's Dilemma or Social Dilemma. Here, we show that a new model for evolution in group-structured populations provides a simple and effective mechanism for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in such a social dilemma. This model does not depend on kin selection, direct or indirect reciprocity, punishment, optional participation or trait-group selection. Since this mechanism depends only on population dynamics and requires no cognitive abilities on the part of the agents concerned, it potentially applies to organisms at all levels of complexity.

scholarly journals Extinction times in diffusive public good population dynamics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory J. Kimmel ◽  
Philip Gerlee ◽  
Philipp M. Altrock
Keyword(s):  
Growth Rate ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Tragedy Of The Commons ◽  
Free Rider ◽  
Extinction Time ◽  
Free Riders ◽  
Time To Extinction ◽  
The Commons

AbstractThe co-evolutionary dynamics of competing populations can be strongly affected by frequency-dependent selection and population structure in space. As co-evolving populations grow into a spatial domain, their initial spatial arrangement, as well as their growth rate differences determine the dynamics. Here, we are interested in the dynamics of producers and free-rider co-evolution in the context of an ecological public good that is produced by a sub-population but evokes growth benefits to all individuals. We consider the spatial growth dynamics in one, two and three dimensions by modeling producer cell, free-rider cell and public good densities in space, driven by birth, death and diffusion. Typically, one population goes extinct. We find that uncorrelated initial spatial structures do not influence the time to extinction in comparison to the well-mixed system. We derive a slow manifold solution in order to estimate the time to extinction of either free-riders or producers. For invading populations, i.e. for populations that are initially highly segregated, we observe a traveling wave, whose speed can be calculated to improve the extinction time estimate by a simple superposition of the two times. Our results show that local effects of spatial dynamics evolve independently of the dynamics of the mean populations. Our considerations provide quantitative predictions for the transient dynamics of cooperative traits under pressure of extinction, and a potential experiment to derive elusive details of the fitness function of an ecological public goods game through extinction time observations.Author SummaryEcological public goods (PG) relationships emerge in growing cellular populations, for example between bacteria and cancer cells. We study the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a PG in populations that grow in space. In our model, public good-producer cells and free-rider cells can grow according to their own birth and death rates. Co-evolution occurs due to public good-driven surplus in the intrinsic growth rates and a cost to producers. A net growth rate benefit to free-riders leads to the well-known tragedy of the commons in which producers go extinct. What is often omitted from discussions is the time scale on which this extinction can occur, especially in spatial populations. We derive analytical estimates of the time to extinction in different spatial settings, and identify spatial scenarios in which extinction takes long enough such that the tragedy of the commons never occurs within the lifetime of the populations. Using numerical simulations we analyze the deviations from analytical predictions. Our results have direct implications for inferring ecological public good game properties from in vitro and in vivo experimental observations.

scholarly journals The Non-Tragedy of the Non-Linear Commons

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Archetti ◽  
István Scheuring ◽  
Douglas Yu
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Structure ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Riders ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Biological Hierarchy

Public goods are produced at all levels of the biological hierarchy, from the secretion of diffusible molecules by cells to social interactions in humans. However, the cooperation needed to produce public goods is vulnerable to exploitation by free-riders — the Tragedy of the Commons. The dominant solution to this problem of collective action is that some form of positive assortment (due to kinship or spatial structure) or of enforcement (reward and punishment) is necessary for public-goods cooperation to evolve. However, these solutions are only needed when individual contributions to the public good accrue linearly, and the assumption of linearity is never true in biology. We explain how cooperation for nonlinearpublic goods is maintained endogenously and does not require positive assortment or enforcement, and we review the considerable empirical evidence for the existence and maintenance of nonlinear public goods in biology. We argue that it is time to move beyond discussions about assortment and enforcement in the study of cooperation in biology.

Ethnic trust, minority status, and public goods in post-conflict societies

2021 ◽  
pp. 002234332098421
Author(s):  
Sam Whitt
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Intergroup Contact ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Minority Status ◽  
The Public ◽  
Attitudes And Behaviors ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
History Of

This study considers how ethnic trust and minority status can impact the ability of ethnic groups to pursue cooperative public goods, focusing on groups with a history of conflict and lingering hostility. A public good experiment between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in postwar Kosovo reveals that subjects contribute far more to a mutually beneficial public good when they are part of an experimentally induced coethnic majority. However, when in the minority, subjects not only underinvest, but many actively divest entirely, privatizing the public good. Majority/minority status also has wide-ranging implications for how individuals relate to real-world public goods and the institutions of government that provide them. Compared to majority Albanians, survey data indicate how minority Serbs in Kosovo express greater safety and security concerns, feel more politically, socially, and economically excluded, are more dissatisfied with civil liberties and human rights protections, and are less likely to participate politically or pay taxes to support public goods. Conflict-related victimization and distrust of out-groups are strong predictors of these minority group attitudes and behaviors. This suggests a mechanism for how conflict amplifies out-group distrust, increasing parochial bias in public good commitments, especially among minorities who are wary of exploitation at the hands of an out-group majority. To restore trust, this study finds that institutional trust and intergroup contact are important to bridging ethnic divides that inhibit public good cooperation.

A Case for Private Provision but Collective Ownership of Public Goods

1998 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Gerdes
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Private Provision ◽  
The Public ◽  
Collective Ownership ◽  
Free Ride ◽  
Voluntary Exchange

One strategy for generating Pareto results in a public good model is to create an environment where traders internalize the public good externality. The model presented here accomplishes this by separating the provision and ownership of public goods. Such goods are privately provided but collectively owned. Under this arrangement, Lindahl prices are generated through the voluntary exchange activities of consumers. Persistent attempts to free ride are not consistent with maximizing behavior which leads to internalization.

Developers, Quality Control and Download Volume in Open Source Software (OSS) Projects

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-66
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Hill ◽  
Pratim Datta ◽  
Candice Vander Weerdt
Keyword(s):  
Quality Control ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Open Source ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Inflection Point ◽  
Returns To Scale ◽  
Tragedy Of The Commons ◽  
Curvilinear Relationship ◽  
Segmented Regression ◽  
The Commons

The open-source software (OSS) movement is often analogized as a commons, where products are developed by and consumed in an open community. However, does a larger commons automatically beget success or does the phenomenon fall prey to the tragedy of the commons? This research forwards and empirically investigates the curvilinear relationship between developers and OSS project quality and a project's download volume. Using segmented regression on over 12,000 SourceForge OSS projects, findings suggest an inflection point in the number of contributing developers on download volume – suggesting increasing and diminishing returns to scale from adding developers to OSS projects. Findings support the economic principle of the tragedy of the commons, a concept where an over-allocated (large number) of developers, even in an open-source environment, can lead to resource mismanagement and reduce the benefit of a public good, i.e. the OSS project.

scholarly journals INSTRUMEN EKONOMI ATAU PRIVATISASI PENGELOLAAN LINGKUNGAN? KOMENTAR ATAS RUU JASA LINGKUNGAN

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 602
Author(s):  
Andri Gunawan Wibisana
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Tragedy Of The Commons ◽  
Environmental Services ◽  
Charge System ◽  
User Charge ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Funds Management

AbstrakIndonesia 's Regional Representatives Board is planning to submit a Bill onenvironmental services. The Bill proposes the establishment of a newinstitution in managing environmental service fund, which is collectedthrough a user-charge system. This new institution is expected to be anindependent Commission of Environmental Funds Management, of whichcommissioners are responsible only to the President. The author finds thatthe spirit of the Bill has nothing to do with the needs to implement economicinstruments in terms of user charge. Instead, the Bill stems from the needs toprivatize public goods such as environmental services. The spirit can be seenin the forms of reference to Hardin's "the Tragedy of the Commons ", inwhich public goods are considered a form of inefficiency in the allocation ofresources that will eventually lead to the overexploitation of the goods. Inaddition, the spirit of privatization can also be seen in the Bill's proposal tohand over the tasks of the Commission, which include planning, execution,and monitoring, to private entities. The author argues that, with such spiritof privatization in the management of natural resources, the Bill is actuallyinconstitutional, and hence, should be rejected.

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