Second-order Dilemma Research Articles

Seeding leading cooperators and institutions in networked climate dilemmas

Global cooperation poses problems shaped by the effects of stakeholders’ decisions on future losses, and how collective risks are perceived. Institutional sanctioning of free-riders may prevent widespread defection in this context. Yet, the prevalence of such institutions represents another second-order dilemma, often as tricky as the tragedy of the commons we aim to avert. Here, we combine evolutionary game theory with techniques widely used in marketing to find, target, and seed leaders and institutions’ promoters to boost cooperation in climate dilemmas. By doing so, we identify the increase in cooperation when introducing a heterogeneous networked population and the conditions under which seeding policies can ensure the self-organization of cooperation and stable institutions. Counter-intuitively, we show that seeding a small fraction of institutional supporters at random network positions practically is as good policy as seeding highly central players in climate dilemmas. We show that cooperation and institutions prevalence are mainly determined by the interaction network and, to a less extent, by imitation ties, and that seeding cooperators only offers marginal benefits when compared with directly seeding sanctioning institutions. Our study also presents a way of incorporating costs when deciding the best policy to apply. Finally, this work suggests that the potential benefits of seeding and targeting techniques are not exclusive to collective dilemmas and can be applied to other dilemmas having structured populations.

Small world can alleviate the social dilemmas originating from self-regulation or community policing issues

Self-regulation and government regulation, community policing and external powerful forces, respectively, form vital part of today’s global economy and social management. The implementation of regulation from self-regulation or community policing requires considerable disciplined members to share the costs of execution, while government or external powerful forces are more likely to make an strong intervention as the industry or community is being widely eroded, which are thus two definitely different feedback regulation schemes. Together with those wrong-doers, the organizations of the two feedback regulation schemes consist of both first-order and novel second-order social dilemma. It still remains a significant challenge to identify an optimal structure to simultaneously alleviate the two dilemmas, and even to additionally favor the altruistic individuals. To address this issue, in this paper we adopt an evolutionary game model within the framework of the public good model, by considering defector-driven and cooperator-driven punishment to map the two feedback regulation schemes, respectively. Through a series of extensive Monte Carlo simulation experiments and mean-field analysis based on replicator dynamics, we finally uncover the combination of clustering and shortcuts, say the small-world structure, is required to largely alleviate both first-order and novel second-order dilemma, which can not only yield optimal public goods by successfully eliminating defectors through strong network reciprocity from dense local connections, but also provide sufficient shortcuts to promote the dominance of defector-driven punishers. Our findings can be beneficial for improving self-regulation or community policing systems by constructing novel monitoring networks.

Cooperative Dilemmas in Microfinance: Ability versus Willingness to Enforce Group Loans in Sierra Leone

Under what structural conditions does the ability to enforce economic cooperation outweigh the willingness to enforce? We derive a framework from sociological theory in which the structural forces that mitigate the first-order cooperative dilemma may simultaneously exacerbate the second-order dilemma. We then examine how two dimensions of structural embeddedness, (1) structural cohesion and (2) disconnected subgroups, shape the behavior of microfinance clients in Sierra Leone. Group lending provides an ideal empirical cooperative dilemma: if one member does not repay, the others are held financially responsible. We complement statistical modelling with ethnographic analysis in a nested research design, the highest level including 5,582 repayments made by 1,884 borrowers. The results clarify how different group structures determine which alternative enforcement mechanisms are likely to dominate collective outcomes. We find that structural cohesion consistently increases economic cooperation to a point, beyond which unwillingness to punish outweighs the benefits of increased ability, resulting in worse group repayment. In contrast, groups that consist of disconnected subgroups are more willing to punish defectors in the out-subgroup. However, they are less able to effectively sanction and overall performance suffers.

The evolution of anti-social rewarding and its countermeasures in public goods games.

Cooperation in joint enterprises can easily break down when self-interests are in conflict with collective benefits, causing a tragedy of the commons. In such social dilemmas, the possibility for contributors to invest in a common pool-rewards fund, which will be shared exclusively among contributors, can be powerful for averting the tragedy, as long as the second-order dilemma (i.e. withdrawing contribution to reward funds) can be overcome (e.g. with second-order sanctions). However, the present paper reveals the vulnerability of such pool-rewarding mechanisms to the presence of reward funds raised by defectors and shared among them (i.e. anti-social rewarding), as it causes a cooperation breakdown, even when second-order sanctions are possible. I demonstrate that escaping this social trap requires the additional condition that coalitions of defectors fare poorly compared with pro-socials, with either (i) better rewarding abilities for the latter or (ii) reward funds that are contingent upon the public good produced beforehand, allowing groups of contributors to invest more in reward funds than groups of defectors. These results suggest that the establishment of cooperation through a collective positive incentive mechanism is highly vulnerable to anti-social rewarding and requires additional countermeasures to act in combination with second-order sanctions.

Rewards and the private provision of public goods on dynamic networks

We study an evolutionary model of a public good game with rewards played on a network. Giving rewards to contributors transforms the game but gives rise to a second-order dilemma. By allowing for coevolution of strategies and network structure, the evolutionary dynamics operate on both structure and strategy. Players learn with whom to interact and how to act and can overcome the second-order dilemma. More specifically, the network represents social distance which changes as players interact. Through the change in social distance, players learn with whom to interact, which we model using reinforcement dynamics. We find that, for certain parameter constellations, a social institution, prescribing prosocial behavior and thus solving the second-order dilemma, can emerge from a population of selfish players. Due to the dynamic structure of the network, the institution has an endogenous punishment mechanism ensuring that defectors will be excluded from the benefits of the institution and the public good will be supplied efficiently.

他者意見が罰行動に与える影響

In addition to the cost of punishment, the fear that others would evaluate punishers negatively can be a major obstacle for resolving the second-order social dilemma or failure of providing sanctions useful for solving a social dilemma problem. In an experiment with 81 participants, we tested whether providing information that other participants were in favor of punishing non-cooperators in a social dilemma situation would enhance cooperation in the second-order dilemma (i.e., punishment of non-cooperators). Participants received feedback of three bogus "participants" choices in a four-person social dilemma, in which one bogus participant defected and two others cooperated, and then received a chance to punish the sole non-cooperator. The hypothesis was supported among those who were motivated to punish the non-cooperator. They punished the non-cooperator when they were informed that the other participants also wanted to punish the non-cooperator. The feedback information that the other participants wanted to punish the non-cooperator induced the participants who were not motivated to punish the non-cooperator to punish less.

Social Approval and the Private Provision of Public Goods in Dynamic Networks

Open source is a term for software published under a license that does not give any property rights to the developers. From the perspective of innovation economics open source is a puzzle. Individual users and firms are allowed to change the software according to one’s needs but are not allowed to raise any license fees. Contributors are not paid and do not hold patents or other property rights in the software but nonetheless they voluntarily spend much time and effort to produce software that everyone can use at no cost. Thus, the source code constitutes a public good in the classical sense. This paper considers how social approval, feedback from others in form of regard, respect, appreciation, admiration and esteem, affects individual’s willingness to contribute to a public good. Several authors suggest that individual contributors derive a private benefit from engaging in open source communities. Social approval provides a private benefit stemming from the public display of one’s ability and reliable feedback. If the gain from social approval outweighs the cost people will contribute to the development of open source software. It has to be sure, however, that the benefit of the rewards is concentrated on those, who give the rewards. Put bluntly, rewards lead to the provision of the public good if those who give rewards are the ones who receive rewards. In this paper we study an evolutionary model of a public good game with rewards played on a network. Giving rewards to contributors transforms the game but gives rise to a second-order dilemma. By allowing for coevolution of strategies and network structure the adaptive dynamics operate on both structure and strategy. Agents learn with whom to interact and how to act and can overcome the second-order dilemma. More specifically, the network represents social distance which changes as agents interact. Through the change in social distance agents learn (not necessarily consciously) with whom to interact, which we model using reinforcement dynamics. We consider different learning speeds and analyze their impact on the long-run frequency of contributions to the public good. We find that for certain parameter constellations a social institution, prescribing prosocial behavior and thus solving the second-order dilemma, can emerge from a population of selfish agents. Due to the dynamic structure of the network the institution has an endogenous punishment mechanism ensuring that defectors will be excluded from the benefits of the institution. Evolutionary models with local interactions on static networks have been explored analytically (see Eshel et al. (1998) for a circle network, Albin and Foley (2001) and Nowak and May (1993) for a two-dimensional lattice, and Watts (1999, chapter 8) for small-world networks). Dynamic networks have recently been discussed by Skyrms and Pemantle (2000), Alexander (2007) and Jun and Sethi (2009), and reinforcement learning has been studied by Brenner (2006) and Arthur (1991). We build on this literature by combining evolutionary games, dynamic networks and reinforcement learning.

Paying for sanctions in social dilemmas: The effects of endowment asymmetry and accountability

The present research examines whether or not endowment asymmetry leads those with many endowments to contribute more than those with few endowments towards the public good (i.e., a first-order dilemma), but also towards the implementation of a sanctioning system (i.e., a second-order dilemma). In Experiment 1, we found that those with many endowments contributed more than those with few endowments in a public good dilemma without a sanctioning system present, whereas those with many endowments did not contribute more than those with few endowments toward the implementation of a sanctioning system. The latter effect, however, was eliminated when participants were accountable (i.e., when expectations that they would have to justify their decisions to others in the group were high). Experiment 2 showed that when participants were accountable, the contributions of those with many endowments (and not those with few endowments) toward the sanctioning system increased, but only when they perceived the group to be more self-evaluative in terms of morality (i.e., high-evaluation expectancy). Experiment 3 showed that this effect of evaluation expectancy only emerged when participants were accountable to the whole group rather than to only one group member.

The second-order dilemma of public goods and capital accumulation

The second-order dilemma arises from each individual’s incentive to free ride on a mechanism to solve the public goods provision problem (the first-order dilemma). We show by a voluntary participation game that if the depreciation rate is low, public goods can be accumulated through voluntary groups for provision, and that the accumulation is effective in solving the second-order dilemma. This analysis also shows that population growth increases the accumulation of public goods in the long run.

Rewards and Punishments as Selective Incentives

Apex games place weak players in the formal equivalent of a multiperson prisoner's dilemma in which each weak player must choose between competing against the other weak players for the opportunity to coalesce with the strong player or cooperating with the other weak players to produce a jointly preferable outcome. Punishments, not rewards, are predicted to be effective for enforcing cooperation by the weak players. Fifty-four groups of four subjects each played the weak role in a five-person apex game with a confederate playing the apex (strong) role in a 3×3 design with factors of low, medium, and high levels of rewards and punishments available as incentives. As predicted, punishments but not rewards had a significant impact on increasing cooperation. Despite this effect, many groups experienced harmful effects of punishment availability that increased the risk of retaliatory spirals. It is concluded that a second-order dilemma may be seen in prisoner's dilemmas, since punishments are both necessary for enforcing cooperation and detrimental to that cooperation.