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.

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

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Archetti ◽  
István Scheuring ◽  
Douglas Yu
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Behavioral Ecology ◽  
Cancer Biology ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Riders ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Biological Hierarchy ◽  
Enforcement Mechanisms

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 solutions to this problem of collective action are that some form of positive assortment (due to kinship or spatial structure) or enforcement (reward and punishment) is necessary for public-goods cooperation to evolve and be maintained. 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 nonlinear public goods is maintained endogenously and does not require positive-assortment or enforcement mechanisms, and we review the considerable empirical evidence for the existence and maintenance of nonlinear public goods in microbiology, cancer biology, and behavioral ecology. We argue that it is time to move beyond discussions about assortment and enforcement in the study of cooperation in biology.

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 Plasticity facilitates sustainable growth in the commons

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (81) ◽  
pp. 20121006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matteo Cavaliere ◽  
Juan F. Poyatos
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Sustainable Management ◽  
Sustainable Growth ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Ecological Constraints ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Riders ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Minimal Effort

In the commons, communities whose growth depends on public good, individuals often rely on surprisingly simple strategies, or heuristics, to decide whether to contribute to the shared resource (at risk of exploitation by free-riders). Although this appears a limitation, we show here how four heuristics lead to sustainable growth when coupled to specific ecological constraints. The two simplest ones—contribute permanently or switch stochastically between contributing or not—are first shown to bring sustainability when the public good efficiently promotes growth. If efficiency declines and the commons is structured in small groups, the most effective strategy resides in contributing only when a majority of individuals are also contributors. In contrast, when group size becomes large, the most effective behaviour follows a minimal-effort rule: contribute only when it is strictly necessary. Both plastic strategies are observed in natural scenarios across scales that present them as relevant social motifs for the sustainable management of public goods.

scholarly journals Walk the Talk? The Effect of Voting and Excludability in Public Goods Experiments

2010 ◽  
Vol 2010 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans J. Czap ◽  
Natalia V. Czap ◽  
Esmail Bonakdarian
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Driving Forces ◽  
Public Project ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Projects ◽  
Individual Contributions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Other Regarding

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of voting and excludability on individual contributions to group projects. We conducted two experiments on excludable and nonexcludable public goods, which provided several important results. First, contrary to our expectations, subjects are generally contributing more to the non-excludable compared to the excludable public good. Second, participating in a vote to choose a public project per se makes no difference in contributions. However, if the project that the individual voted for also gets selected by the group, they contribute significantly more to that project. Third, empathy and locus of control are important driving forces of participation in common projects. Our results have implications on the procedural design of obtaining funding for public projects. First, the public should get involved and have a say in the determination of which project should be realized. Second, it might well pay off to attempt to develop a consensus among the population and obtain near unanimous votes, because in our experiment, subjects discriminate between the project they voted for and the project chosen by the majority. Third, the policy proposers should stress the other-regarding interest of the public good rather than just pecuniary incentives.

scholarly journals Eco-evolutionary spatial dynamics of non-linear social dilemmas

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaitanya S. Gokhale ◽  
Hye Jin Park
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Structure ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Spatial Dynamics ◽  
Social Dilemmas ◽  
Evolutionary Games ◽  
Evolution Of Cooperation ◽  
Evolutionary Trajectory ◽  
The Public ◽  
Non Linear

AbstractSpatial dynamics can promote the evolution of cooperation. While dispersal processes have been studied in simple evolutionary games, real-world social dilemmas are much more complicated. The public good, in many cases, does not increase linearly as per the investment in it. When the investment is low, for example, every additional unit of the investment may help a lot to increase the public good, but the effect vanishes as the number of investments increase. Such non-linear behaviour is the norm rather than an exception in a variety of social as well as biological systems. We take into account the non-linearity in the payoffs of the public goods game as well as the natural demographic effects of population densities. Population density has also been shown to impact the evolution of co-operation. Coupling these non-linear games and population size effect together with an explicitly defined spatial structure brings us one step closer to the complexity of real eco-evolutionary spatial systems. We show how the non-linearity in payoffs, resulting in synergy or discounting of public goods can alter the effective rate of return on the cooperative investment. Synergy or discounting in public goods accumulation affects the resulting spatial structure, not just quantitatively but in some cases, drastically changing the outcomes. In cases where a linear payoff structure would lead to extinction, synergy can support the coexistence of cooperators and defectors. The combined eco-evolutionary trajectory can thus be qualitatively different in cases on non-linear social dilemmas.

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.

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.

Individual differences in cooperation in a circular public goods game

2001 ◽  
Vol 15 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. S37-S52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Kurzban ◽  
Daniel Houser
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
Public Goods Game ◽  
Self Monitoring ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Riders ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Unknown Point

Research using the public goods game to examine behaviour in the context of social dilemmas has repeatedly shown substantial individual differences in patterns of contributions to the public good. We present here a new method specifically designed to capture this heterogeneity in play and classify participants into broad categories or types. Players in groups of four made initial, simultaneous contributions to the public good. Subsequently, players were sequentially told the current aggregate contribution to the public good and allowed to change their decision based on this information. The game continued, with players updating their contribution decision until the game ended at an unknown point. By looking at the relationship between players' contributions and the aggregate value they observed, we were able to cleanly classify 82% of our players into three types: strong free riders (28%), conditional cooperators of reciprocators (29%), and strong cooperators (25%). We also found that scores on some of the personality dimensions we investigated (self‐monitoring, self‐esteem, neuroticism, and conscientiousness) correlated with player type. Finally, males were found to be more likely to be strong cooperators than females. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

scholarly journals Bringing tax avoiders to light: moral framing and shaming in a public goods experiment

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Stefanos A. Tsikas
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Public Good ◽  
Social Dilemmas ◽  
Tax Avoidance ◽  
Social Contagion ◽  
Public Goods Game ◽  
Free Riders ◽  
Social Sanctions ◽  
Moral Framing ◽  
Public Goods Experiment

Abstract With a linear public goods game played in six different variants, this article studies two channels that might moderate social dilemmas and increase cooperation without using pecuniary incentives: moral framing and shaming. We find that cooperation is increased when noncontributing to a public good is framed as morally debatable and socially harmful tax avoidance, while the mere description of a tax context has no effect. However, without social sanctions in place, cooperation quickly deteriorates due to social contagion. We find ‘shaming’ free-riders by disclosing their misdemeanor to act as a strong social sanction, irrespective of the context in which it is applied. Moralizing tax avoidance significantly reinforces shaming, compared with a simple tax context.

scholarly journals Punishment Strategies across Societies: Conventional Wisdoms Reconsidered

Games ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Ramzi Suleiman ◽  
Yuval Samid
Keyword(s):  
Public Goods ◽  
Strong Predictor ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Public Goods Game ◽  
The Public ◽  
Free Riders ◽  
The World ◽  
Emergence Of Cooperation ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Cost

Experiments using the public goods game have repeatedly shown that in cooperative social environments, punishment makes cooperation flourish, and withholding punishment makes cooperation collapse. In less cooperative social environments, where antisocial punishment has been detected, punishment was detrimental to cooperation. The success of punishment in enhancing cooperation was explained as deterrence of free riders by cooperative strong reciprocators, who were willing to pay the cost of punishing them, whereas in environments in which punishment diminished cooperation, antisocial punishment was explained as revenge by low cooperators against high cooperators suspected of punishing them in previous rounds. The present paper reconsiders the generality of both explanations. Using data from a public goods experiment with punishment, conducted by the authors on Israeli subjects (Study 1), and from a study published in Science using sixteen participant pools from cities around the world (Study 2), we found that: 1. The effect of punishment on the emergence of cooperation was mainly due to contributors increasing their cooperation, rather than from free riders being deterred. 2. Participants adhered to different contribution and punishment strategies. Some cooperated and did not punish (‘cooperators’); others cooperated and punished free riders (‘strong reciprocators’); a third subgroup punished upward and downward relative to their own contribution (‘norm-keepers’); and a small sub-group punished only cooperators (‘antisocial punishers’). 3. Clear societal differences emerged in the mix of the four participant types, with high-contributing pools characterized by higher ratios of ‘strong reciprocators’, and ‘cooperators’, and low-contributing pools characterized by a higher ratio of ‘norm keepers’. 4. The fraction of ‘strong reciprocators’ out of the total punishers emerged as a strong predictor of the groups’ level of cooperation and success in providing the public goods.

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