Which risk scenarios can drive the emergence of costly cooperation?

Hagel, Kristin; Chakra, Maria Abou; Bauer, Benedikt; Traulsen, Arne

doi:10.1038/srep19269

Cited by 18 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Regardless of what the goal of an interaction is, the present study is a simple example of “multi-target” evolutionary games, where the diversity of individual targets one may hope to achieve is mirrored in the array of strategies one can adopt for each specific purpose. This theoretical framework offers many possibilities to explore in the future, such as changing goals over time, considering not only expected payoffs but also the associated distribution of payoffs 78 , or looking at the coevolution of behavior and cognition 79 . We conclude with the hope that this paper will help motivate research along these lines in the near future.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leaders should not be conformists in evolutionary social dilemmas

Szolnoki

Perc

2016

Sci Rep

125

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The most common assumption in evolutionary game theory is that players should adopt a strategy that warrants the highest payoff. However, recent studies indicate that the spatial selection for cooperation is enhanced if an appropriate fraction of the population chooses the most common rather than the most profitable strategy within the interaction range. Such conformity might be due to herding instincts or crowd behavior in humans and social animals. In a heterogeneous population where individuals differ in their degree, collective influence, or other traits, an unanswered question remains who should conform. Selecting conformists randomly is the simplest choice, but it is neither a realistic nor the optimal one. We show that, regardless of the source of heterogeneity and game parametrization, socially the most favorable outcomes emerge if the masses conform. On the other hand, forcing leaders to conform significantly hinders the constructive interplay between heterogeneity and coordination, leading to evolutionary outcomes that are worse still than if conformists were chosen randomly. We conclude that leaders must be able to create a following for network reciprocity to be optimally augmented by conformity. In the opposite case, when leaders are castrated and made to follow, the failure of coordination impairs the evolution of cooperation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leaders should not be conformists in evolutionary social dilemmas

Szolnoki

Perc

2016

Sci Rep

125

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“…If not, a catastrophe occurs with certain probability, and all participants lose all the money they kept. While many experimental and theoretical studies have considered different aspects of climate change within this framework [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29], the issue of heterogeneity has only been considered in two experiments. Thus, Tavoni et al [15].…”

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confidence: 99%

Resource heterogeneity leads to unjust effort distribution in climate change mitigation

et al. 2018

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Climate change mitigation is a shared global challenge that involves collective action of a set of individuals with different tendencies to cooperation. However, we lack an understanding of the effect of resource inequality when diverse actors interact together towards a common goal. Here, we report the results of a collective-risk dilemma experiment in which groups of individuals were initially given either equal or unequal endowments. We found that the effort distribution was highly inequitable, with participants with fewer resources contributing significantly more to the public goods than the richer −sometimes twice as much. An unsupervised learning algorithm classified the subjects according to their individual behavior, finding the poorest participants within two “generous clusters” and the richest into a “greedy cluster”. Our results suggest that policies would benefit from educating about fairness and reinforcing climate justice actions addressed to vulnerable people instead of focusing on understanding generic or global climate consequences.

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“…As the expected-winnings curve flattens, a given further enhancement in expected winnings comes at an ever higher expense in contribution, something that might be unattractive as a strategy given the uncertainty in the other subjects' behaviour. A theoretical analysis of T 3 has shown (Hagel et al, 2016) that at the social optimum, the expected pay-out for an individual player decreases if this player unilaterally increases his or her contribution, whereas the symmetric Nash equilibrium (at which any change in contribution by any player would confer no benefit to this player) lies at much lower average contributions than the social optimum (Hagel et al, 2016).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The climate game involves investing in a public good, not in order to realize a gain but to avoid a loss. The collective-risk social dilemma has been used as the workhorse to study various collective problems faced by humans (Wang et al, 2009;Wang et al, 2010;Milinski et al, 2011;Tavoni et al, 2011;Abou Chakra and Traulsen, 2012;Chen et al, 2012a,b;Santos et al, 2012;Burton-Chellew et al, 2013;Hilbe et al, 2013;Jacquet et al, 2013;Abou Chakra and Traulsen, 2014;Chen et al, 2014;Du et al, 2014;Freytag et al, 2014;Vasconcelos et al, 2014;Dannenberg et al, 2015;Bynum et al, 2016;Hagel et al, 2016;Milinski et al, 2016). Here, we add a crucial component by experimentally investigating the behavioural consequences of differing assessed risk levels if the 2°C climate target is missed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The level of climate-change mitigation depends on how humans assess the risk arising from missing the 2°C target

2017

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The established international 2°C target stipulates that global warming should be limited to below 2°C compared with pre-industrial periods; this has emerged as the most prominent interpretation of how to avoid dangerous climate change. The 2°C target was confirmed and made legally binding in the Paris agreement at the "climate summit" (Conference of Parties 21, COP21) in December 2015. But despite agreement on the target, greenhouse-gas emissions are unlikely to fall soon and fast enough to meet the target, raising the question of whether this target needs to be revised or reinterpreted, and also of why there is insufficient cooperation toward emissions reduction despite the risk of dangerous climate change. Previous theoretical and experimental research has suggested that cooperation towards emissions reduction is undermined by uncertainty about the threshold marking the transition to dangerous climate change. However, even if the threshold and hence the location of the target are known precisely, uncertainty ensues because of an unknown risk that arises from missing the collective target. How humans deal with this risk has not been investigated experimentally. Here we investigate how individuals behave under different risk scenarios if a collective target is missed. We perform economics experiments framed as a collective-risk social dilemma and directly examine the extent to which human subjects trade pay-out reduction for risk. We show that a reduced assessed risk arising from missing the collective target leads to reduced contributions towards the target; but that risk reduction causes the subjects almost to maximize their individual pay-out by balancing the effort to reach the target against the risk posed by missing it. We provide quantitative support for the argument that group contributions toward the collective target can be interpreted as proportional to mitigated warming. We conclude that reinterpretation of the 2°C target as less strict causes additional warming. However, our subjects deal effectively with a risk of dangerous climate change that they assess to depend gradually on global warming. Our results suggest that, if the additional warming is judged to be acceptable, a less strict interpretation of the 2°C target might support finding a trade-off between the effort put into climate mitigation and the risk of dangerous climate change.

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Which risk scenarios can drive the emergence of costly cooperation?

Cited by 18 publications

References 45 publications

Leaders should not be conformists in evolutionary social dilemmas

Leaders should not be conformists in evolutionary social dilemmas

Resource heterogeneity leads to unjust effort distribution in climate change mitigation

The level of climate-change mitigation depends on how humans assess the risk arising from missing the 2°C target

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