An open code pledge for the neuroscience community

Sharing of research code would greatly benefit neuroscience, but this practice is hampered by a collective action problem. Since the development of the internet, conditional pledge platforms (e.g., Kickstarter) have increasingly been used to solve globally-dispersed collective action problems (Hallam, 2016). However, this strategy has yet to be implemented within academia. In this brief paper, we introduce a general purpose conditional pledge platform for the research community: Project Free Our Knowledge. We highlight a new conditional pledge campaign that was initiated at Brainhack 2021 and aims to motivate a critical mass of neuroscientists to share their research code. Crucially, this commitment activates only when a user-defined threshold of support is reached. We conclude by sharing our vision for how the research community could use collective action campaigns to create a sustained, evidence-based movement for social change in academia.

Reputation or Interaction: What Drives Cooperation on Economic Sanctions?

This article studies cooperation on multilateral economic sanctions. Despite low effectiveness and sanction-busting, multilateral economic sanctions are a popular tool of foreign policy. We explore an instrumental approach to sanctions and develop a game theory framework where sender states face a collective action problem when coordinating multilateral coercion. We indicate that cooperation can be achieved through repeated interactions and reputation. We test empirically the two mechanisms with the TIES data on economic sanctions and adherence to past sanction regimes and the Correlates of War data on membership in International Organisations. Our results indicate that reputation is a strong predictor of cooperation on multilateral economic coercion. The effect of repeated interaction appears conditional on reputation; states with poor reputation mediate its effect through repeated interaction.

The Effect of Incentives: Diffusion of Responsibility

Diffusion of responsibility refers to the problem that when something is everyone’s job, it in effect ends up being nobody’s job. This explains why many collective problems arise. People face perverse incentives to free ride on others’ actions and not to do their part. As a result, agents often think in short-term rather than long-term ways. Problems such as climate change can be modeled as instances of the tragedy of the commons, one form of a collective action problem that arises due to perverse incentives created by the diffusion of responsibility.

Climate Change Inaction and Optimism

The problem of climate change inaction is sometimes said to be ‘wicked’, or essentially insoluble, and it has also been seen as a collective action problem, which is correct but inconsequential. In the absence of progress, much is made of various frailties of the public, hence the need for an optimistic tone in public discourse to overcome fatalism and encourage positive action. This argument is immaterial without meaningful action in the first place, and to favour what amounts to the suppression of truth over intellectual openness is in any case disreputable. ‘Optimism’ is also vexed in this context, often having been opposed to the sombre mood of environmentalists by advocates of economic growth. The greater mental impediments are ideological fantasy, which is blind to the contradictions in public discourse, and the misapprehension that if optimism is appropriate in one social or policy context it must be appropriate in others. Optimism, far from spurring climate change action, fosters inaction.

Collective Responses to Covid-19 and Climate Change

Both individuals and governments around the world have willingly sacrificed a great deal to meet the collective action problem posed by Covid-19. This has provided some commentators with newfound hope about the possibility that we will be able to solve what is arguably the greatest collective action problem of all time: global climate change. In this paper we argue that this is overly optimistic. We defend two main claims. First, these two collective action problems are so different that the actions that individuals have taken to try to solve the problem posed by Covid-19 unfortunately provide little indication that we will be able to solve the problem posed by climate change. Second, the actions that states have taken in response to Covid-19 might—if anything—even be evidence that they will continue to fail to cooperate towards a solution to the climate crisis.

Pro-Environmental Attitudes, Altruism, and COVID-19 Risk Management Behavior

Limiting the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic is a collective action problem that calls on individuals to act, not just for their benefit but also for the benefit of others in their community. Many environmental problems, especially climate change, share this same characteristic. In this study, we use a survey instrument to examine how pro-environmental attitudes and two types of altruism relate to the tendency to follow social distancing guidelines and limit voluntary social exposure during the pandemic. We find that pro-environmental behaviors predict a feeling of moral obligation to reduce COVID-19 risk and a lower level of voluntary social exposure. Voluntary, individual-level altruism has no relationship with social exposure. These findings point to important insights about the nuances in altruistic behavior. These insights may lead to essential guidance for public health and environmental messaging that respects and leverages the differences in voluntary, individual-level altruism and collective altruism.

The Contours of a Modern Labor System

This chapter explains why policies that encourage union membership and promote broad-based bargaining would enable labor to deliver much more for workers and the economy than they can under the current system. The chapter discusses why labor has been in decline in the United States and elsewhere but has been able to maintain strength in a few other countries with favorable policies. Policies that actively encourage union membership are needed to counteract the collective action problem unions present. The chapter also discusses why collective bargaining currently does not work very well in the United States but could be much improved by shifting toward broader-based bargaining. Compared to worksite bargaining, broad-based bargaining raises wages for more workers, reduces economic inequality as well as gender and racial pay gaps to a greater degree, and is better suited to the way firms are structured in the modern economy.

Dynamics of collective action to conserve a large common-pool resource

A pressing challenge for coming decades is sustainable and just management of large-scale common-pool resources including the atmosphere, biodiversity and public services. This poses a difficult collective action problem because such resources may not show signs that usage restraint is needed until tragedy is almost inevitable. To solve this problem, a sufficient level of cooperation with a pro-conservation behavioural norm must be achieved, within the prevailing sociopolitical environment, in time for the action taken to be effective. Here we investigate the transient dynamics of behavioural change in an agent-based model on structured networks that are also exposed to a global external influence. We find that polarisation emerges naturally, even without bounded confidence, but that for rationally motivated agents, it is temporary. The speed of convergence to a final consensus is controlled by the rate at which the polarised clusters are dissolved. This depends strongly on the combination of external influences and the network topology. Both high connectivity and a favourable environment are needed to rapidly obtain final consensus.

International Soft Law: A Review on Paris Agreement

Paris agreement, despite its many aspects and mixture of hard, soft, and non-obligations that are distinct and contain importance and vitality, however, they are not fully clarified in terms of their boundaries. There are various discussions and debates upon the agreements’ success or failure. Additionally, drives behind political parties, further motivation for more compliance with the agreement and to encourage major actors for higher response levels against climate change as it is “the most difficult and complex collective action problem of the world”. In this article, challenges to the agreement are noted and possible approaches towards a better future for application and compliance with the agreement are presented. For this purpose, categories of law are looked into in regard to Paris agreement and a number of aspects are highlighted. The interrelation link that exist among these obligations regardless of their forms is explored through the context of Paris agreement and its critical importance is emphasized. Our doctrine approach compares and investigates most recent and relevant studies upon the matter at hand and endeavors to create a better understanding on the importance of Paris agreement