Related papers: Spontaneous cooperation for public goods
Everyone wants clean air, peace and other public goods but is tempted to freeride on others' efforts. The usual way out of this dilemma is to impose norms, maintain reputations and incentivize individuals to contribute. In situations of…
Cooperative behavior among unrelated individuals in human and animal societies represents a most intriguing puzzle to scientists in various disciplines. Here we present a simple yet effective mechanism promoting cooperation under full…
Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity…
The problem of free-riding arises when individuals benefit from a shared resource, service, or public good without contributing proportionately to its provision. This conduct often leads to a collective action problem, as individuals pursue…
Identifying mechanisms able to sustain costly cooperation among self-interested agents is a central problem across social and biological sciences. One possible solution is peer punishment: when agents have an opportunity to sanction…
We introduce a new model that mimics the strong and sudden effects induced by conformity in tightly interacting human societies. Such effects range from mere crowd phenomena to dramatic political turmoil. The model is a modified version of…
According to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan [1651; 2008 (Touchstone, New York), English Ed], "the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," and it would need powerful social institutions to establish social order. In reality,…
The emergence of cooperation in the groups of interacting agents is one of the most fascinating phenomena observed in many complex systems studied in social science and ecology, even in the situations where one would expect the agent to use…
Properly coordinating cooperation is relevant for resolving public good problems such as clean energy and environmental protection. However, little is known about how individuals can coordinate themselves for a certain level of cooperation…
Individuals in groups must often choose between acting selfishly and cooperating for the common good. The choices they make are based on their beliefs on how they expect their actions to affect others. We show that for a broad set of…
Theoretical models suggest that social networks influence the evolution of cooperation, but to date there have been few experimental studies. Observational data suggest that a wide variety of behaviors may spread in human social networks,…
It is a challenging task to reach global cooperation among self-interested agents, which often requires sophisticated design or usage of incentives. For example, we may apply supervisors or referees who are able to detect and punish…
Indirect reciprocity is a key explanation for the exceptional magnitude of cooperation among humans. This literature suggests that a large proportion of human cooperation is driven by social norms and individuals' incentives to maintain a…
The Optional Public Goods Game is a three-strategy game in which an individual can play as a cooperator or defector or decide not to participate. Despite its simplicity, this model can effectively represent many human social dilemmas, such…
Cooperators that refuse to participate in sanctioning defectors create the second-order free-rider problem. Such cooperators will not be punished because they contribute to the public good, but they also eschew the costs associated with…
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…
During intergroup confrontations, agitating stimuli such as opponents' threats and provocations can trigger collective violence, even without the usual mechanisms of ingroup cooperation, such as norms with sanctions. We examine video…
Standard order-disorder phase transition in the Ising model is described in terms of rates of processes of spin flips. This formulation allows to extend numerous results on phase transition for sciences other than physics of magnetism. We…
In this work we study opinion formation in a population participating of a public debate with two distinct choices. We considered three distinct mechanisms of social interactions and individuals' behavior: conformity, nonconformity and…
Understanding how cooperation emerges in public goods games is crucial for addressing societal challenges. While optional participation can establish cooperation without identifying cooperators, it relies on specific assumptions -- that…