Search Results (11)

Human cooperation is ubiquitous and instinctive. We are among the most cooperative species on Earth. Still, research mostly focuses on why we cooperate, instead of understanding why some of us do not do so. The public goods game can be used to map human cooperation as well as to study free riding. We acquired data through an online, unincentivized questionnaire which prompted respondents to choose how much of an initial endowment to contribute to a common pool. The respondents contributed, on average, 54% of their initial endowment to the common pool. The usual categorization scheme of the elicited conditional contribution pattern discerns unconditional free riders who do not contribute irrespective of the contributions of others and calls everyone a conditional cooperator who correlates their contribution with that of the others. However, someone consistently offering less than the others should not be called a cooperator. Consequently, based on the conditional contribution patterns among our respondents, we suggest a recategorization of contribution patterns into the following categories: unconditional cooperator (1.5%), unconditional free rider (10.6%), perfect conditional cooperator (42.6%), hump-shaped contributor (0.7%), V-shaped contributor (0.4%), conditional cooperator (16.6%), conditional free rider (13.6%), conditional contributor (6.4%), negative conditional contributor (0%), and others (7.6%). We only call someone a cooperator if the respondent at least matches others’ contribution, and call everyone consistently offering less a free rider. Furthermore, we found no difference between the contributions of women and men. No correlation of contribution with age, educational attainment, and size of the residential settlement was found. Students’ contributions were not different from non-students’ contributions. We found a significant correlation of the contribution to the common pool with hypercompetitive orientation (negative correlation) and the self-assessed willingness to take risks in general (positive correlation). Full article

The competitiveness of rural tourism destinations holds significant implications not only for local livelihood sustainability and regional development but also for the preservation and continuity of human civilization. However, developing countries face a critical challenge where rural tourism destination competitiveness is being progressively undermined by the pervasive homogenization of tourism products. The existing literature demonstrates limited engagement with mitigation strategies for tourism product homogenization in examinations of rural destination competitiveness. This study conceptualizes tourism product homogenization as a manifestation of the tragedy of tourism commons, proposing that self-governance can foster rural tourism destination competitive advantages through resolving such collective action dilemmas. Employing a combined IAD-SES framework, the investigation analyzes interview data from Yuanjia Village in Shaanxi Province, China. The analysis delineates how self-governance dynamically enhances and sustains rural tourism destination competitiveness through four institutional mechanisms: provision rules, appropriation rules, monitoring protocols, and sanctioning systems. Furthermore, the findings reveal that the competitiveness driven by self-governance demonstrates the capacity to align individual interests with collective societal benefits. This research contributes to tourism scholarship by identifying novel institutional determinants of tourism destination competitiveness and proposing a policy framework for addressing product homogenization challenges throughout the rural tourism area life cycle. Full article

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. Full article

This paper sets out a proposal for framing collective responsibility as a central element within the cooperative governance of climate change. It begins by reconstructing the analysis of climate change as a Tragedy of the Commons in the economic literature and as a Problem of Many Hands in the ethical literature. Both formalizations are shown to represent dilemmatic situations where an individual has no rational incentive to prevent the climate crisis and no moral requirement to be held responsible for contributing to it. Traditionally both dilemmas have been thought to be solvable only through a vertical structure of decision-making. Where contemporary research in political economy has undergone a “governance revolution”, showing how horizontal networks of public, private, and civil society actors can play an important role in the management of the climate crisis, little research has been carried out in the ethical field on how to secure accountability and responsibility within such a cooperative structure of social agency. Therefore, this paper contributes by individuating some conditions for designing responsible and accountable governance processes in the management of climate change. It concludes by claiming that climate change is addressable only insofar as we transition from a morality based on individual responsibility to a new conception of morality based on our co-responsibility for preventing the climate crisis. Full article

Common pool resource (CPR) management has the potential to overcome the collective action dilemma, defined as the tendency for individual users to exploit natural resources and contribute to a tragedy of the commons. Design principles associated with effective CPR management help to ensure that arrangements work to the mutual benefit of water users. This study contributes to current research on CPR management by examining the process of implementing integrated management planning through the lens of CPR design principles. Integrated management plans facilitate the management of a complex common pool resource, ground and surface water resources having a hydrological connection. Water governance structures were evaluated through the use of participatory methods and observed records of interannual changes in rainfall, evapotranspiration, and ground water levels across the Northern High Plains. The findings, documented in statutes, field interviews and observed hydrologic variables, point to the potential for addressing large-scale collective action dilemmas, while building on the strengths of local control and participation. The feasibility of a “bottom up” system to foster groundwater resilience was evidenced by reductions in groundwater depths of 2 m in less than a decade. Full article

Cooperation in social dilemmas plays a pivotal role in the formation of systems at all levels of complexity, from replicating molecules to multi-cellular organisms to human and animal societies. In spite of its ubiquity, the origin and stability of cooperation pose an evolutionary conundrum, since cooperation, though beneficial to others, is costly to the individual cooperator. Thus natural selection would be expected to favor selfish behavior in which individuals reap the benefits of cooperation without bearing the costs of cooperating themselves. Many proximate mechanisms have been proposed to account for the origin and maintenance of cooperation, including kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and evolution in structured populations. Despite the apparent diversity of these approaches they all share a unified underlying logic: namely, each mechanism results in assortative interactions in which individuals using the same strategy interact with a higher probability than they would at random. Here we study the evolution of cooperation in both discrete strategy and continuous strategy social dilemmas with assortative interactions. For the sake of tractability, assortativity is modeled by an individual interacting with another of the same type with probability r and interacting with a random individual in the population with probability $1-r$, where r is a parameter that characterizes the degree of assortativity in the system. For discrete strategy social dilemmas we use both a generalization of replicator dynamics and individual-based simulations to elucidate the donation, snowdrift, and sculling games with assortative interactions, and determine the analogs of Hamilton’s rule, which govern the evolution of cooperation in these games. For continuous strategy social dilemmas we employ both a generalization of deterministic adaptive dynamics and individual-based simulations to study the donation, snowdrift, and tragedy of the commons games, and determine the effect of assortativity on the emergence and stability of cooperation. Full article

The use of summer pastures in the European Alps provides much evidence against Hardin’s prediction of the tragedy of the commons. For centuries, farmers have kept summer pastures in communal tenure and avoided its overuse with self-designed regulations. During the past decades, however, summer pastures have become less intensely used, which has reduced its agronomic value and the by-production of public goods. However, very little is known about how the various governance incentives affect farmers’ use of summer pasture to result in below-sustainable activity. In this study, we develop an empirically informed game theoretical model of farmers’ land use decisions, which we validate with survey data from a case study in Switzerland. Our results reveal that farmers weigh the benefit of resource use against the costs of maintaining it and that all major sectoral developments, such as increasing livestock endowment, increasing opportunity costs, and decreasing land use intensity on private plots, result in the reduced use of summer pastures. Based on these insights, we suggest adapting the incentive structure at the local and federal governance levels to increase incentives for stocking at the margin. Our study shows how game theory combines with field validation to identify the contextual behavioral drivers in common pool resource dilemmas for informed and improved policy making. Full article

Compared to the literature on quantitative and statistical modelling, there is a lack of research on qualitative environmental-related modelling, which focuses on a conceptual-theory-based model. Therefore, this paper attempts to formulate a qualitative institutional-social-ecological model, by showcasing how the 10 steps modelling is relevant and is applied to the institutional-property-rights model of neighbourhood residential commons. Using an instance from one case study (i.e., Sabah, Malaysia), a conceptual problem-solution model describing local property-rights system tragedies of public open space (POS) governance and quality, and the emergence of self-governing collective action was demonstrated. Methodologically, the modelling procedures were specified as a 10-step process, starting with setting the objectives of the model and concluding with the validation of suitability and usefulness of the model. The validation was conducted using the experts’ opinion, via the semi-structured interviews with five public officials. With slight necessary amendments, the model was proven practical, useful, flexible, reliable and valid in serving its purposes in understanding and predicting the effects of local property-rights system tragedies on POS commons dilemmas, and the subsequent emergence and necessity of a self-governing solution. This local model provides policy insights to the local public officials, which facilitate their institutional-social-ecological decision-making process that helps improve local POS governance and quality. Full article

In the present research, we investigated the roles of both personal values and situational characteristics in predicting environmentally irresponsible behavior using the tragedy of commons dilemma. Graduate or undergraduate students (n = 138) visited the laboratory as a group of four and completed measures of personal values and played a commons dilemma game online. Participants were led to believe that they were playing with the other three participants, but they were in fact playing with three bot players that were manipulated to use the shared resources either cooperatively or competitively. It was found that people who put more emphasis on extrinsic values (financial success, appealing appearance, and social recognition) relative to intrinsic values (personal growth, affiliation, and community contribution) consumed more shared resources than their counterparts. However, this link was significant only in the competitive condition, suggesting an interaction between personal and situational factors. Supplementary analyses indicate that financial success and community contribution are particularly important in predicting environmentally irresponsible behavior. Full article

We analyse active space debris removal efforts from a strategic, game-theoretical perspective. Space debris is non-manoeuvrable, human-made objects orbiting Earth, which pose a significant threat to operational spacecraft. Active debris removal missions have been considered and investigated by different space agencies with the goal to protect valuable assets present in strategic orbital environments. An active debris removal mission is costly, but has a positive effect for all satellites in the same orbital band. This leads to a dilemma: each agency is faced with the choice between the individually costly action of debris removal, which has a positive impact on all players; or wait and hope that others jump in and do the ‘dirty’ work. The risk of the latter action is that, if everyone waits, the joint outcome will be catastrophic, leading to what in game theory is referred to as the ‘tragedy of the commons’. We introduce and thoroughly analyse this dilemma using empirical game theory and a space debris simulator. We consider two- and three-player settings, investigate the strategic properties and equilibria of the game and find that the cost/benefit ratio of debris removal strongly affects the game dynamics. Full article

In Garrett Hardin’s popular essay on “The Tragedy of the Commons”, he presents a model of a shared commons where herdsmen graze their cattle to illustrate the tension between group and self-interest that characterizes so many social dilemmas. However, Hardin is not explicit that consumption can actually vary widely among herdsman, although later, when discussing population growth, he clarifies that “people vary”. People do indeed vary, and here we explore further the prevalence of asymmetrical contributions to the tragedy of the commons. We also provide several examples to demonstrate that asymmetries have been frequently underappreciated by conservation initiatives. Given that many of today’s major environmental problems, such as climate change, freshwater shortages, and overfishing, are problems of users or groups of users over-consuming common resources asymmetrically, we believe identifying patterns of consumption is a necessary first step in solving any social dilemma, and can help elucidate priority areas for conservation. Full article