Related papers: Cooperation for public goods under uncertainty

Cooperation for public goods poses a dilemma, where individuals are tempted to free ride on others' contributions. Classic solutions involve monitoring, reputation maintenance and costly incentives, but there are important collective…

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…

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…

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…

In large groups, every collaborative act requires balancing two pressures: the need to achieve behavioural synchrony and the need to keep free riding to a minimum. This paper introduces a model of collaboration that requires both…

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…

Although cooperation is central to the organisation of many social systems, relatively little is known about cooperation in situations of collective emergency. When groups of people flee from a danger such as a burning building or a…

Cooperation is central to the success of human societies as it is crucial for overcoming some of the most pressing social challenges of our time. Yet how human cooperation is achieved and may persist is still a main puzzle in the social and…

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…

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…

While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges,…

We study the emergence of cooperation in large spatial public goods games. Without employing severe social-pressure against "defectors", or alternatively, significantly rewarding "cooperators", theoretical models typically predict a system…

Cooperation in human society is sustained by reputation. In general, the reputation of an individual is determined by others who observe his behavior, but this rarely happens in private situations. This may cause people to behave…

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…

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,…

The costly provision of public goods serves as a model problem for the evolution of cooperative behavior, presenting a social dilemma between the collective benefits of shared resources and the individual incentive to free-ride in resource…

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…

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…

In the commons, communities whose growth depends on public goods, individuals often rely on surprisingly simple strategies, or heuristics, to decide whether to contribute to the common good (at risk of exploitation by free-riders). Although…

Understanding cooperation in social systems is challenging because the ever-changing rules that govern societies interact with individual actions, resulting in intricate collective outcomes. In virtual-world experiments, we allowed people…