Abstract
What do corruption, resource overexploitation, climate inaction, vaccine hesitancy, traffic congestion, and even cancer metastasis have in common? All these socioeconomic and sociobiological phenomena are known as social dilemmas because they embody in one form or another a fundamental conflict between immediate self-interest and long-term collective interest. A shortcut to the resolution of social dilemmas has thus far been reserved solely for highly stylised cases reducible to dyadic games (e.g., the Prisoner’s Dilemma), whose nature and outcome coalesce in the concept of dilemma strength. We show that a social efficiency deficit, measuring an actor’s potential gain in utility or fitness by switching from an evolutionary equilibrium to a social optimum, generalises dilemma strength irrespective of the underlying social dilemma’s complexity. We progressively build from the simplicity of dyadic games for which the social efficiency deficit and dilemma strength are mathematical duals, to the complexity of carcinogenesis and a vaccination dilemma for which only the social efficiency deficit is numerically calculable. The results send a clear message to policymakers to enact measures that increase the social efficiency deficit until the strain between what is and what could be incentivises society to switch to a more desirable state.
Highlights
What do corruption, resource overexploitation, climate inaction, vaccine hesitancy, traffic congestion, and even cancer metastasis have in common? All these socioeconomic and sociobiological phenomena are known as social dilemmas because they embody in one form or another a fundamental conflict between immediate self-interest and long-term collective interest
We show that a social efficiency deficit generalises the concept of dilemma strength from dyadic games to social dilemmas of almost any complexity
Dilemma strength predicts the outcome of dyadic games both in theory and practice
Summary
Resource overexploitation, climate inaction, vaccine hesitancy, traffic congestion, and even cancer metastasis have in common? All these socioeconomic and sociobiological phenomena are known as social dilemmas because they embody in one form or another a fundamental conflict between immediate self-interest and long-term collective interest. Violate the dyadic format and lack an obvious analogue to the concept of dilemma strength This already holds for widely applicable Public Goods Games as a multiplayer generalisation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma[15], and extends to closely related common-goods exploitation games[16]. Complexity escalates when social dilemmas are modelled after major societal concerns encompassing c orruption[26,26], vaccine hesitancy[27,28,29], traffic congestion[30,31,32], and countless o thers[33,34,35] In view of such widespread use of social dilemmas, and a limited scope of dilemma strength as an ex ante predictor, a key question is whether it is possible to conceptually generalise dilemma strength to cover the full spectrum of social dilemmas, and uniformly guide policymaking for a better society
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