Framing in multiple public goods games and donation to charities.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Maciel Cardoso F
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8097214 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Voluntary participation in public goods games (PGGs) has turned out to be a simple but effective mechanism for promoting cooperation under full anonymity. Voluntary participation allows individuals to adopt a risk-aversion strategy, termed loner. A loner refuses to participate in unpromising public enterprises and instead relies on a small but fixed pay-off. This system leads to a cyclic dominance of three pure strategies, cooperators, defectors and loners, but at the same time, there remain two considerable restrictions: the addition of loners cannot stabilize the dynamics and the time average pay-off for each strategy remains equal to the pay-off of loners. Here, we introduce probabilistic participation in PGGs from the standpoint of diversification of risk, namely simple mixed strategies with loners, and prove the existence of a dynamical regime in which the restrictions ono longer hold. Considering two kinds of mixed strategies associated with participants (cooperators or defectors) and non-participants (loners), we can recover all basic evolutionary dynamics of the two strategies: dominance; coexistence; bistability; and neutrality, as special cases depending on pairs of probabilities. Of special interest is that the expected pay-off of each mixed strategy exceeds the pay-off of loners at some interior equilibrium in the coexistence region.
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Project description:Evolution of cooperation has been a major issue in evolutionary biology. Cooperation is observed not only in dyadic interactions, but also in social interactions involving more than two individuals. It has been argued that direct reciprocity cannot explain the emergence of cooperation in large groups because the basin of attraction for the 'cooperative' equilibrium state shrinks rapidly as the group size increases. However, this argument is based on the analysis of models that consider the deterministic process. More recently, stochastic models of two-player games have been developed and the conditions for natural selection to favour the emergence of cooperation in finite populations have been specified. These conditions have been given as a mathematically simple expression, which is called the one-third law. In this paper, we investigate a stochastic model of n-player games and show that natural selection can favour a reciprocator replacing a population of defectors in the n-player repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game. We also derive a generalized version of the one-third law (the {2/[n(n+1)]}1/(n-1) law). Additionally, contrary to previous studies, the model suggests that the evolution of cooperation in public goods game can be facilitated by larger group size under certain conditions.
| S-EPMC2660957 | biostudies-literature
Project description:When creating a public good, strategies or mechanisms are required to handle defectors. We first show mathematically and numerically that prior agreements with posterior compensations provide a strategic solution that leads to substantial levels of cooperation in the context of public goods games, results that are corroborated by available experimental data. Notwithstanding this success, one cannot, as with other approaches, fully exclude the presence of defectors, raising the question of how they can be dealt with to avoid the demise of the common good. We show that both avoiding creation of the common good, whenever full agreement is not reached, and limiting the benefit that disagreeing defectors can acquire, using costly restriction mechanisms, are relevant choices. Nonetheless, restriction mechanisms are found the more favourable, especially in larger group interactions. Given decreasing restriction costs, introducing restraining measures to cope with public goods free-riding issues is the ultimate advantageous solution for all participants, rather than avoiding its creation.
| S-EPMC4305422 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Life-history strategies are a crucial aspect of life, which are complicated in group-living species, where pay-offs additionally depend on others' behaviours. Previous theoretical models of public goods games have generally focused on the amounts individuals contribute to the public good. Yet a much less-studied strategic aspect of public goods games, the timing of contributions, can also have dramatic consequences for individual and collective performance. Here, we develop two stage game theoretical models to explore how the timing of contributions evolves. In the first stage, individuals contribute to a threshold public good based on a performance schedule. The second stage begins once the threshold is met, and the individuals then compete as a function of their performance. We show how contributing rapidly is not necessarily optimal, because delayers can act as 'cheats,' avoiding contributing while reaping the benefits of the public good. However, delaying too long can put the delayers at a disadvantage as they may be ill-equipped to compete. These effects lead to bistability in a single group, and spatial diversity among multiple interacting groups.
| S-EPMC7287346 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Some scholars find that behavioral variation in the public goods game is explained by variations in participants' understanding of how to maximize payoff and that confusion leads to cooperation. Their findings lead them to question the common assumption in behavioral economics experiments that choices reflect motivations. We conduct two experiments, in which we minimize confusion by providing participants with increased training. We also introduce a question that specifically assesses participants' understanding of payoff maximization choices. Our experimental results show that the distribution of behavior types is significantly different when participants play with computers versus humans. A significant increase in contributions is also observed when participants play with humans compared to when they play with computers. Moreover, social norms may be the main motive for contributions when playing with computers. Our findings suggest that social preferences, rather than confusion, play a crucial role in determining contributions in public goods games when playing with humans. We therefore argue that the assumption in behavioral economics experiments that choices reveal motivations is indeed valid.
| S-EPMC10927562 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Cooperation, where one individual incurs a cost to help another, is a fundamental building block of the natural world and human society. It has been suggested that costly punishment can promote the evolution of cooperation, with the threat of punishment deterring free-riders. Recent experiments, however, have revealed the existence of 'antisocial' punishment, where non-cooperators punish cooperators. While various theoretical models find that punishment can promote the evolution of cooperation, these models a priori exclude the possibility of antisocial punishment. Here we extend the standard theory of optional public goods games to include the full set of punishment strategies. We find that punishment no longer increases cooperation, and that selection favours substantial levels of antisocial punishment for a wide range of parameters. Furthermore, we conduct behavioural experiments, showing results consistent with our model predictions. As opposed to an altruistic act that promotes cooperation, punishment is mostly a self-interested tool for protecting oneself against potential competitors.
| S-EPMC3279747 | biostudies-literature
Project description:From the microscopic to the macroscopic level, biological life exhibits directed migration in response to environmental conditions. Chemotaxis enables microbes to sense and move towards nutrient-rich regions or to avoid toxic ones. Socio-economic factors drive human populations from rural to urban areas. The effect of collective movement is especially significant when triggered in response to the generation of public goods. Microbial communities can, for instance, alter their environment through the secretion of extracellular substances. Some substances provide antibiotic-resistance, others provide access to nutrients or promote motility. However, in all cases the maintenance of public goods requires costly cooperation and is consequently susceptible to exploitation. The threat of exploitation becomes even more acute with motile individuals because defectors can avoid the consequences of their cheating. Here, we propose a model to investigate the effects of targeted migration and analyze the interplay between social conflicts and migration in ecological public goods. In particular, individuals can locate attractive regions by moving towards higher cooperator densities or avoid unattractive regions by moving away from defectors. Both migration patterns not only shape an individual's immediate environment but also affects the entire population. For example, defectors hunting cooperators have a homogenizing effect on population densities. This limits the production of the public good and hence inhibits the growth of the population. In contrast, aggregating cooperators promote the spontaneous formation of patterns through heterogeneous density distributions. The positive feedback between cooperator aggregation and public goods production, however, poses analytical and numerical challenges due to its tendency to develop discontinuous distributions. Thus, different modes of directed migration bear the potential to enhance or inhibit the emergence of complex and sometimes dynamic spatial arrangements. Interestingly, whenever patterns emerge, cooperation is promoted, on average, population densities rise, and the risk of extinction is reduced.
| S-EPMC6687102 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The evolution of cooperation has remained an important problem in evolutionary theory and social sciences. In this regard, a curious question is why consistent cooperative and defective personalities exist and if they serve a role in the evolution of cooperation? To shed light on these questions, here, I consider a population of individuals who possibly play two consecutive rounds of public goods game, with different enhancement factors. Importantly, individuals have independent strategies in the two rounds. However, their strategy in the first round affects the game they play in the second round. I consider two different scenarios where either only first-round cooperators play a second public goods game, or both first-round cooperators and first-round defectors play a second public goods game, but in different groups. The first scenario can be considered a reward dilemma, and the second can be considered an assortative public goods game but with independent strategies of the individuals in the two rounds. Both models show cooperators can survive either in a fixed point or through different periodic orbits. Interestingly, due to the emergence of a correlation between the strategies of the individuals in the two rounds, individuals develop consistent personalities during the evolution. This, in turn, helps cooperation to flourish. These findings shed new light on the evolution of cooperation and show how consistent cooperative and defective personalities can evolve and play a positive role in solving social dilemmas.
| S-EPMC8660839 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The occurrence and maintenance of cooperative behaviors in public goods systems have attracted great research attention across multiple disciplines. A threshold public goods game requires a minimum amount of contributions to be collected from a group of individuals for provision to occur. Here we extend the common binary-strategy combination of cooperation and defection by adding a third strategy, called insured cooperation, which corresponds to buying an insurance covering the potential loss resulted from the unsuccessful public goods game. Particularly, only the contributing agents can opt to be insured, which is an effort decreasing the amount of the potential loss occurring. Theoretical computations suggest that when agents face the potential aggregate risk in threshold public goods games, more contributions occur with increasing compensation from insurance. Moreover, permitting the adoption of insurance significantly enhances individual contributions and facilitates provision, especially when the required threshold is high. This work also relates the strategy competition outcomes to different allocation rules once the resulted contributions exceed the threshold point in populations nested within a dilemma.
| S-EPMC4357994 | biostudies-other
Project description:It has become an accepted paradigm that humans have "prosocial preferences" that lead to higher levels of cooperation than those that would maximize their personal financial gain. However, the existence of prosocial preferences has been inferred post hoc from the results of economic games, rather than with direct experimental tests. Here, we test how behavior in a public-goods game is influenced by knowledge of the consequences of actions for other players. We found that (i) individuals cooperate at similar levels, even when they are not informed that their behavior benefits others; (ii) an increased awareness of how cooperation benefits others leads to a reduction, rather than an increase, in the level of cooperation; and (iii) cooperation can be either lower or higher than expected, depending on experimental design. Overall, these results contradict the suggested role of the prosocial preferences hypothesis and show how the complexity of human behavior can lead to misleading conclusions from controlled laboratory experiments.
| S-EPMC3538240 | biostudies-literature