scholarly journals The Tragedy of the Commons as a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Its Relevance for Sustainability Games

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8125
Author(s):  
Alessio Carrozzo Magli ◽  
Pompeo Della Posta ◽  
Piero Manfredi
Keyword(s):  
Prisoner's Dilemma ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Prisoner’S Dilemma ◽  
Tragedy Of The Commons ◽  
Policy Interventions ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Sustainability Policy ◽  
Harmful Effects ◽  
Ultimate Nature

In the current battle for sustainability and climate, understanding the nature of sustainability games is of paramount importance, especially to inform appropriate policy actions to contrast the harmful effects of global climate change. Relatedly, there is no consensus in the literature on the proper game-theoretic representation of the so-called Tragedy of the Commons. A number of contributions have questioned the prisoner’s dilemma as an appropriate framework. In this work, we provide a representation that reconciles these two positions, confirming the ultimate nature of the Tragedy as a prisoner’s dilemma, rather than a coordination issue, and discuss the ensuing implications for sustainability policy interventions.

scholarly journals The world's biomes and primary production as a triple tragedy of the commons foraging game played among plants

2016 ◽  
Vol 283 (1842) ◽  
pp. 20161993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon G. McNickle ◽  
Miquel A. Gonzalez-Meler ◽  
Douglas J. Lynch ◽  
Jennifer L. Baltzer ◽  
Joel S. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Primary Production ◽  
Tragedy Of The Commons ◽  
Plant Production ◽  
Root Production ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Evolutionarily Stable Strategies ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Tissue Production

Plants appear to produce an excess of leaves, stems and roots beyond what would provide the most efficient harvest of available resources. One way to understand this overproduction of tissues is that excess tissue production provides a competitive advantage. Game theoretic models predict overproduction of all tissues compared with non-game theoretic models because they explicitly account for this indirect competitive benefit. Here, we present a simple game theoretic model of plants simultaneously competing to harvest carbon and nitrogen. In the model, a plant's fitness is influenced by its own leaf, stem and root production, and the tissue production of others, which produces a triple tragedy of the commons. Our model predicts (i) absolute net primary production when compared with two independent global datasets; (ii) the allocation relationships to leaf, stem and root tissues in one dataset; (iii) the global distribution of biome types and the plant functional types found within each biome; and (iv) ecosystem responses to nitrogen or carbon fertilization. Our game theoretic approach removes the need to define allocation or vegetation type a priori but instead lets these emerge from the model as evolutionarily stable strategies. We believe this to be the simplest possible model that can describe plant production.

scholarly journals Niṣkāmakarma: A Philosophical Analysis in Light of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the Concept of Degrowth

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Tommi Lehtonen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Prisoner's Dilemma ◽  
Prisoner’S Dilemma ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Personal Benefit ◽  
The Common ◽  
Harmful Effects

The prisoner's dilemma famously shows that individuals seeking their own benefit end up with a worse outcome than could be achieved through cooperation. This dilemma provides an effective but neglected method for the study of the Hindu principle of "desireless action" (niṣkāmakarma). In the context of the prisoner's dilemma, one or the other of the following decision-making strategies is feasible for prisoners who want to follow the principle of "desireless action": (1) to be indifferent and to leave the decision to chance (e.g. by arbitrarily drawing lots) or (2) to pursue the common good or the benefit of the other (by remaining silent) instead of seeking primarily to benefit oneself (by confessing). The second strategy is more appropriate assuming the following: the followers of the principle of "desireless action" can be goal-oriented and target-driven, as long as unselfish goals are considered, while remaining indifferent and non-attached in terms of personal benefit. This interpretation is tested and further discussed in this article in light of the values of the modem environmental and anti-consumerist degrowth movement. A non-profit orientation and the emphasis on duties are shared by the concepts of degrowth and niṣkāmakarma. Social- or reality-centredness rather than self-centredness is also common to both concepts. The degrowth movement focuses on economic contraction and deceleration, and thus its scope is narrower and more specific than that of niṣkāmakarma. Moreover, the degrowth movement rejects economic grovrth because of its ecologically and socially harmful effects, such as pollution and income inequality, but it is - at least in theory - indifferent to the harmless results of economic activities. On the contrary, the principle of niṣkāmakarma involves a critical stance toward both good and bad results of actions, insofar as they are pursued because of self-regarding desires.

scholarly journals Games of Two Halves: Non-Experimental Evidence on Cooperation, Defection and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-312
Author(s):  
Stephen Dobson ◽  
John Goddard
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Prisoner's Dilemma ◽  
Prisoner’S Dilemma ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Cooperative Behaviour ◽  
Strategic Choices ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Soccer Teams ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Game Theoretic Model

We develop a stylized two-period game-theoretic model of the strategic choices made by soccer teams when selecting between defensive and attacking team formations, and between non-violent and violent styles of play. Cooperative behaviour during the early stages of matches is typically superseded by non-cooperation during the latter stages. The propensity for violent play to take place in the latter stages of soccer matches is interpreted as novel non-experimental evidence that players typically resort to mutually detrimental non-cooperative forms of behaviour when the payoffs assume a prisoner’s dilemma structure.

Free-Rider Problems in the Production of Collective Goods

1987 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Hampton
Keyword(s):  
Prisoner's Dilemma ◽  
Prisoner’S Dilemma ◽  
Free Rider ◽  
Collective Good ◽  
Free Rider Problem ◽  
Collective Goods ◽  
Partial Analysis ◽  
Collective Action Problems ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Willingness To Contribute

There has been a persistent tendency to identify what is called “the freerider problem” in the production of collective (or public) goods with the prisoner's dilemma. However, in this article I want to challenge that identification by presenting an analysis of what are in fact a variety of collective action problems in the production of collective goods. My strategy is not to consult any intuitions about what the free-rider problem is; rather I will be looking at the problematic game-theoretic structures of various situations associated with the production of different types of collective goods, thereby showing what sorts of difficulties a community concerned with their voluntary production would face. I call all of these dilemmas free-rider problems because in all of them certain individuals find it rational to take advantage of others' willingness to contribute to the good in a way that threatens its production. Some readers may feel that the term ‘free-rider problem’ is so identified with the prisoner's dilemma that my extension of the term in this way “jars”; if so, I invite them to coin another word for the larger phenomenon. My aim is not to engage in linguistic analysis but to attempt at least a partial analysis of the complicated structure of collective good production.

scholarly journals An oscillating tragedy of the commons in replicator dynamics with game-environment feedback

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (47) ◽  
pp. E7518-E7525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Weitz ◽  
Ceyhun Eksin ◽  
Keith Paarporn ◽  
Sam P. Brown ◽  
William C. Ratcliff
Keyword(s):  
Replicator Dynamics ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Tragedy Of The Commons ◽  
Individual Behavior ◽  
Global Maximum ◽  
Rational Choices ◽  
The Commons ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Individual Actions ◽  
Game Environment

A tragedy of the commons occurs when individuals take actions to maximize their payoffs even as their combined payoff is less than the global maximum had the players coordinated. The originating example is that of overgrazing of common pasture lands. In game-theoretic treatments of this example, there is rarely consideration of how individual behavior subsequently modifies the commons and associated payoffs. Here, we generalize evolutionary game theory by proposing a class of replicator dynamics with feedback-evolving games in which environment-dependent payoffs and strategies coevolve. We initially apply our formulation to a system in which the payoffs favor unilateral defection and cooperation, given replete and depleted environments, respectively. Using this approach, we identify and characterize a class of dynamics: an oscillatory tragedy of the commons in which the system cycles between deplete and replete environmental states and cooperation and defection behavior states. We generalize the approach to consider outcomes given all possible rational choices of individual behavior in the depleted state when defection is favored in the replete state. In so doing, we find that incentivizing cooperation when others defect in the depleted state is necessary to avert the tragedy of the commons. In closing, we propose directions for the study of control and influence in games in which individual actions exert a substantive effect on the environmental state.

Why Hobbes' State of Nature is Best Modeled by an Assurance Game

Utilitas ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL MOEHLER
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Prisoner's Dilemma ◽  
Prisoner’S Dilemma ◽  
The State ◽  
The Third ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Assurance Game ◽  
Third Law

In this article, I argue that if one closely follows Hobbes' line of reasoning in Leviathan, in particular his distinction between the second and the third law of nature, and the logic of his contractarian theory, then Hobbes' state of nature is best translated into the language of game theory by an assurance game, and not by a one-shot or iterated prisoner's dilemma game, nor by an assurance dilemma game. Further, I support Hobbes' conclusion that the sovereign must always punish the Foole, and even exclude her from the cooperative framework or take her life, if she defects once society is established, which is best expressed in the language of game theory by a grim strategy. That is, compared to existing game-theoretic interpretations of Hobbes, I argue that the sovereign plays a grim strategy with the citizens once society is established, and not the individuals with one another in the state of nature.

scholarly journals Decentralized Job Scheduling in the Cloud Based on a Spatially Generalized Prisoner’s Dilemma Game

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 737-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakub Gąsior ◽  
Franciszek Seredyński
Keyword(s):  
Prisoner's Dilemma ◽  
Job Scheduling ◽  
Prisoner’S Dilemma ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Global Scheduling ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Job Scheduling Problem ◽  
Selfish Agents ◽  
Specific Number ◽  
Spatial Prisoner’S Dilemma

Abstract We present in this paper a novel distributed solution to a security-aware job scheduling problem in cloud computing infrastructures. We assume that the assignment of the available resources is governed exclusively by the specialized brokers assigned to individual users submitting their jobs to the system. The goal of this scheme is allocating a limited quantity of resources to a specific number of jobs minimizing their execution failure probability and total completion time. Our approach is based on the Pareto dominance relationship and implemented at an individual user level. To select the best scheduling strategies from the resulting Pareto frontiers and construct a global scheduling solution, we developed a decision-making mechanism based on the game-theoretic model of Spatial Prisoner’s Dilemma, realized by selfish agents operating in the two-dimensional cellular automata space. Their behavior is conditioned by the objectives of the various entities involved in the scheduling process and driven towards a Nash equilibrium solution by the employed social welfare criteria. The performance of the scheduler applied is verified by a number of numerical experiments. The related results show the effectiveness and scalability of the scheme in the presence of a large number of jobs and resources involved in the scheduling process.

Universalizing and the we: endogenous game theoretic deontology

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Paul Studtmann ◽  
Shyam Gouri Suresh
Keyword(s):  
Nash Equilibrium ◽  
Prisoner's Dilemma ◽  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Prisoner’S Dilemma ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pareto Improvement ◽  
Moral Framework ◽  
Interacting Agents ◽  
Game Theoretic

Abstract The Nash counterfactual considers the question: what would happen were I to change my behaviour assuming no one else does. By contrast, the Kantian counterfactual considers the question: what would happen were everyone to deviate from some behaviour. We present a model that endogenizes the decision to engage in this type of Kantian reasoning. Autonomous agents using this moral framework receive psychic payoffs equivalent to the cooperate-cooperate payoff in Prisoner’s Dilemma regardless of the other player’s action. Moreover, if both interacting agents play Prisoner’s Dilemma using this moral framework, their material outcomes are a Pareto improvement over the Nash equilibrium.

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