Combination of institutional incentives for cooperative governance of risky commons

The paradigm of tax-reward and tax-punishment strategies in the advancement of public resource management dynamics

In contemporary society, the effective utilization of public resources remains a subject of significant concern. A common issue arises from defectors seeking to obtain an excessive share of these resources for personal gain, potentially leading to resource depletion. To mitigate this tragedy and ensure sustainable development of resources, implementing mechanisms to either reward those who adhere to distribution rules or penalize those who do not, appears advantageous. We introduce two models: a tax-reward model and a tax-punishment model, to address this issue. Our analysis reveals that in the tax-reward model, the evolutionary trajectory of the system is influenced not only by the tax revenue collected but also by the natural growth rate of the resources. Conversely, the tax-punishment model exhibits distinct characteristics when compared with the tax-reward model, notably the potential for bistability. In such scenarios, the selection of initial conditions is critical, as it can determine the system's path. Furthermore, our study identifies instances where the system lacks stable points, exemplified by a limit cycle phenomenon, underscoring the complexity and dynamism inherent in managing public resources using these models.

Success-driven opinion formation determines social tensions

Polarization is common in politics and public opinion. It is believed to be shaped by media as well as ideologies, and often incited by misinformation. However, little is known about the microscopic dynamics behind polarization and the resulting social tensions. By coupling opinion formation with the strategy selection in different social dilemmas, we reveal how success at an individual level transforms to global consensus or lack thereof. When defection carries with it the fear of punishment in the absence of greed, as in the stag-hunt game, opinion fragmentation is the smallest. Conversely, if defection promises a higher payoff and also evokes greed, like in the prisoner's dilemma and snowdrift game, consensus is more difficult to attain. Our research thus challenges the top-down narrative of social tensions, showing they might originate from fundamental principles at individual level, like the desire to prevail in pairwise evolutionary comparisons.

An evolutionary game for the behavior of third-party evaluators in pension public-private partnership incorporating public participation

This study analyzes the impact of public participation on the choice of third-party evaluators' behavior strategies during the service quality supervision process of China's pension public-private partnership project. An evolutionary game model between third-party evaluators and government regulators is developed, wherein the evolution rule of the two sides and public participation's influence on their behavior under the two different conditions are analyzed, and a numerical simulation is carried out using MATLAB 2016a. It is found that third-party evaluators may choose the false evaluation strategy without public participation because of the inducement of rent-seeking or insufficient government punishment when the regulatory revenue of the government regulatory agencies is less than the regulatory cost. In contrast, in the case of public participation, the true evaluation strategy is chosen with an improvement in the level of public participation or an increase in reputation incentive. This suggests the construction and improvement of a third-party evaluation system, which shows that the construction of the service quality supervision system in China's pension PPP project has a large operating space.

Cost optimisation of hybrid institutional incentives for promoting cooperation in finite populations

In this paper, we rigorously study the problem of cost optimisation of hybrid (mixed) institutional incentives, which are a plan of actions involving the use of reward and punishment by an external decision-maker, for maximising the level (or guaranteeing at least a certain level) of cooperative behaviour in a well-mixed, finite population of self-regarding individuals who interact via cooperation dilemmas (Donation Game or Public Goods Game). We show that a mixed incentive scheme can offer a more cost-efficient approach for providing incentives while ensuring the same level or standard of cooperation in the long-run. We establish the asymptotic behaviour (namely neutral drift, strong selection, and infinite-population limits). We prove the existence of a phase transition, obtaining the critical threshold of the strength of selection at which the monotonicity of the cost function changes and providing an algorithm for finding the optimal value of the individual incentive cost. Our analytical results are illustrated with numerical investigations. Overall, our analysis provides novel theoretical insights into the design of cost-efficient institutional incentive mechanisms for promoting the evolution of cooperation in stochastic systems.

The evolution and social cost of herding mentality promote cooperation

Herding behavior has a social cost for individuals not following the herd, influencing human decision-making. This work proposes including a social cost derived from herding mentality into the payoffs of pairwise game interactions. We introduce a co-evolutionary asymmetric model with four individual strategies (cooperation vs. defection and herding vs. non-herding) to understand the co-emergence of herding behavior and cooperation. Computational experiments show how including herding costs promotes cooperation by increasing the parameter space under which cooperation persists. Results demonstrate a synergistic relationship between the emergence of cooperation and herding mentality: the highest cooperation is achieved when the herding mentality also achieves its highest level. Finally, we study different herding social costs and its relationship to cooperation and herding evolution. This study points to new social mechanisms, related to conformity-driven imitation behavior, that help to understand how and why cooperation prevails in human groups.

Evolution of conditional cooperation in collective-risk social dilemma with repeated group interactions

The evolution and long-term sustenance of cooperation has consistently piqued scholarly interest across the disciplines of evolutionary biology and social sciences. Previous theoretical and experimental studies on collective risk social dilemma games have revealed that the risk of collective failure will affect the evolution of cooperation. In the real world, individuals usually adjust their decisions based on environmental factors such as risk intensity and cooperation level. However, it is still not well understood how such conditional behaviours affect the evolution of cooperation in repeated group interactions scenario from a theoretical perspective. Here, we construct an evolutionary game model with repeated interactions, in which defectors decide whether to cooperate in subsequent rounds of the game based on whether the risk exceeds their tolerance threshold and whether the number of cooperators exceeds the collective goal in the early rounds of the game. We find that the introduction of conditional cooperation strategy can effectively promote the emergence of cooperation, especially when the risk is low. In addition, the risk threshold significantly affects the evolutionary outcomes, with a high risk promoting the emergence of cooperation. Importantly, when the risk of failure to reach collective goals exceeds a certain threshold, the timely transition from a defective strategy to a cooperative strategy by conditional cooperators is beneficial for maintaining high-level cooperation.

Evolution of cooperation in multiplex networks through asymmetry between interaction and replacement

Cooperation is the foundation of society and has been the subject of numerous studies over the past three decades. However, the mechanisms underlying the spread of cooperation within a group are not yet fully comprehended. We analyze cooperation in multiplex networks, a model that has recently gained attention for successfully capturing certain aspects of human social connections. Previous studies on the evolution of cooperation in multiplex networks have shown that cooperative behavior is promoted when the two key processes in evolution, interaction and strategy replacement, are performed with the same partner as much as possible, that is, symmetrically, in a variety of network structures. We focus on a particular type of symmetry, namely, symmetry in the scope of communication, to investigate whether cooperation is promoted or hindered when interactions and strategy replacements have different scopes. Through multiagent simulations, we found some cases where asymmetry can promote cooperation, contrasting with previous studies. These results hint toward the potential effectiveness of not only symmetrical but also asymmetrical approaches in fostering cooperation within particular groups under certain social conditions.

Coevolutionary dynamics via adaptive feedback in collective-risk social dilemma game

Human society and natural environment form a complex giant ecosystem, where human activities not only lead to the change in environmental states, but also react to them. By using collective-risk social dilemma game, some studies have already revealed that individual contributions and the risk of future losses are inextricably linked. These works, however, often use an idealistic assumption that the risk is constant and not affected by individual behaviors. Here, we develop a coevolutionary game approach that captures the coupled dynamics of cooperation and risk. In particular, the level of contributions in a population affects the state of risk, while the risk in turn influences individuals' behavioral decision-making. Importantly, we explore two representative feedback forms describing the possible effect of strategy on risk, namely, linear and exponential feedbacks. We find that cooperation can be maintained in the population by keeping at a certain fraction or forming an evolutionary oscillation with risk, independently of the feedback type. However, such evolutionary outcome depends on the initial state. Taken together, a two-way coupling between collective actions and risk is essential to avoid the tragedy of the commons. More importantly, a critical starting portion of cooperators and risk level is what we really need for guiding the evolution toward a desired direction.

The coordination of collective and individual solutions in risk-resistant scenarios

ABSTRACT

Human societies are constantly coping with global risks. In the face of these risks, people typically have two options, that is, to respond together as a whole (collective solution) or to respond independently (individual solution). Based on these two solutions, individuals have a variety of behavioral strategies. On the other hand, various regulatory bodies supported by the population limit people's choices and punish individuals who do not contribute to collective solutions. So with different risks, how do the two solutions, the various individual strategies, and the constraints from regulators affect the group's response to risk? This paper proposes an extended public goods game model involving opportunists and the regulator to explore the effectiveness of collective and individual solutions against risks. The results show that requiring individuals to invest more in the collective solution reduces the group' s success in resisting risk. To improve the group's ability to resist risk, investment in individual solution should be at least no less than that in collective solution. The establishment fund and punishment intensity of the regulatory agency have no significant effect on the success of collective and individual solutions. This inspires us to contemplate the role and measures of various types of authorities in coping with global risks.

Social dilemma in the excess use of antimicrobials incurring antimicrobial resistance

The emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) caused by the excess use of antimicrobials has come to be recognized as a global threat to public health. There is a 'tragedy of the commons' type social dilemma behind this excess use of antimicrobials, which should be recognized by all stakeholders. To address this global threat, we thus surveyed eight countries/areas to determine whether people recognize this dilemma and showed that although more than half of the population pays little, if any, attention to it, almost 20% recognize this social dilemma, and 15-30% of those have a positive attitude toward solving that dilemma. We suspect that increasing individual awareness of this social dilemma contributes to decreasing the frequency of AMR emergencies.

Fast deliberation is related to unconditional behaviour in iterated Prisoners' Dilemma experiments

People have different preferences for what they allocate for themselves and what they allocate to others in social dilemmas. These differences result from contextual reasons, intrinsic values, and social expectations. What is still an area of debate is whether these differences can be estimated from differences in each individual's deliberation process. In this work, we analyse the participants' reaction times in three different experiments of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with the Drift Diffusion Model, which links response times to the perceived difficulty of the decision task, the rate of accumulation of information (deliberation), and the intuitive attitudes towards the choices. The correlation between these results and the attitude of the participants towards the allocation of resources is then determined. We observe that individuals who allocated resources equally are correlated with more deliberation than highly cooperative or highly defective participants, who accumulate evidence more quickly to reach a decision. Also, the evidence collection is faster in fixed neighbour settings than in shuffled ones. Consequently, fast decisions do not distinguish cooperators from defectors in these experiments, but appear to separate those that are more reactive to the behaviour of others from those that act categorically.

Authority or Autonomy? Exploring Interactions between Central and Peer Punishments in Risk-Resistant Scenarios

Game theory provides a powerful means to study human cooperation and better understand cooperation-facilitating mechanisms in general. In classical game-theoretic models, an increase in group cooperation constantly increases people's gains, implying that individual gains are a continuously varying function of the cooperation rate. However, this is inconsistent with the increasing number of risk-resistant scenarios in reality. A risk-resistant scenario means once a group does not successfully resist the risk, all individuals lose their resources, such as a community coping with COVID-19 and a village resisting a flood. In other words, individuals' gains are segmented about the collaboration rate. This paper builds a risk-resistant model to explore whether punishment still promotes collaboration when people resist risk. The results show that central and peer punishments can both encourage collaboration but with different characteristics under different risk-resistant scenarios. Specifically, central punishment constrains the collaboration motivated by peer punishment regardless of risk, while peer punishment limits the collaboration induced by central punishment only when the risk is high. Our findings provide insights into the balance between peer punishment from public autonomy and central punishment from central governance, and the proposed model paves the way for the development of richer risk-resistant models.

Costly incentives design from an institutional perspective: cooperation, sustainability and affluence

Incentives are usually introduced by the regulator entity (third-party), to promote cooperation in a market. The implementation of incentives is always costly and thus might fail to be enforced sustainably. This work aims at exploring the effects of incentives from an institutional perspective, while coping with the scenario where the third-party is part of the system but not composed by players. The evolutionary game theory (EGT) framework is applied to identify the incentives that lead to pure cooperation. In contrast to traditional EGT, this paper introduces an elimination mechanism that can reduce the market size. The incentives identified in the EGT analysis are further examined in simulation experiments which measure the market size, affluence and sustainability. The findings show: (1) light punishment leads to a reduction of the market size, yet heavier punishment is beneficial to the market size and wealth; (2) mixed incentives will generally lead to different wealth of the third party and of the participants. While under moderate strength, the wealth of both parties is the same and their overall wealth is maximal; (3) for sustainability, pure punishment (resp. reward) is sustainable (resp. unsustainable), the sustainability of mixed incentives depends on both their strength and agents’ rationality level.

Indirect exclusion can promote cooperation in repeated group interactions

Social exclusion has been regarded as one of the most effective measures to promote the evolution of cooperation. In real society, the way in which social exclusion works can be direct or indirect. However, thus far there is no related work to explore how indirect exclusion influences the evolution of cooperation from a theoretical perspective. Here, we introduce indirect exclusion into the repeated public goods game where the game organizer probabilistically selects cooperators after the first game round to participate in the following possible game interactions. We then investigate the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation both in infinite and finite well-mixed populations. Through theoretical analysis and numerical calculations, we find that the introduction of indirect exclusion can induce the stable coexistence of cooperators and defectors or the dominance of cooperators, which thus effectively promotes the evolution of cooperation. Besides, we show that the identifying probability of the organizer has a nonlinear effect on public cooperation when its value is lower than an intermediate value, while the higher identifying probability can maintain a high level of cooperation. Furthermore, our results show that increasing the average rounds of game interactions can effectively promote the evolution of cooperation.

Supervision for the Public Health Services for Older Adults Under the Background of Government Purchasing: An Evolutionary Game Analysis Framework

As an important measure to involve services for older adults, the government procurement practices have become a key link for public health services. However, the information asymmetry between public health service purchasers and public health service undertakers triggers a supervision dilemma. Based on this background, this study uses the evolutionary game theory to analyze the symbiotic evolution between local governments and public health service institutions under different reward and punishment mechanisms, explore game evolution, strategy adjustment, and influencing factors of different game subjects, and analyze the necessity and appropriate intensity of dynamic rewards and punishment mechanisms. The results show that: under the static condition, the penalty can change the strategies of local governments to a certain extent, but it is still difficult to achieve complete self-discipline management of public health service institutions. If local governments implement a dynamic reward or penalty mechanism in the supervision process of public health services for older adults, the equilibrium between them tends to be evolutionary stable. For three dynamic mechanisms, a dynamic reward mechanism is more conducive to adopting a self-discipline behavior of public health service institutions, which is helpful to realize the supervision of public health services for older adults. Also, there is a positive correlation between the proportion of public health service institutions who adopt a "self-discipline behavior" strategy and the maximum punishment intensity, and a negative correlation with the reward intensity. This study provides theoretical and decision-making references for governments to explore the promotion and implementation of public health services in older adults.

Institutional incentives for the evolution of committed cooperation: ensuring participation is as important as enhancing compliance

Both conventional wisdom and empirical evidence suggest that arranging a prior commitment or agreement before an interaction takes place enhances the chance of reaching mutual cooperation. Yet it is not clear what mechanisms might underlie the participation in and compliance with such a commitment, especially when participation is costly and non-compliance can be profitable. Here, we develop a theory of participation and compliance with respect to an explicit commitment formation process and to institutional incentives where individuals, at first, decide whether or not to join a cooperative agreement to play a one-shot social dilemma game. Using a mathematical model, we determine whether and when participating in a costly commitment, and complying with it, is an evolutionarily stable strategy, resulting in high levels of cooperation. We show that, given a sufficient budget for providing incentives, rewarding of commitment compliant behaviours better promotes cooperation than punishment of non-compliant ones. Moreover, by sparing part of this budget for rewarding those willing to participate in a commitment, the overall level of cooperation can be significantly enhanced for both reward and punishment. Finally, the presence of mistakes in deciding to participate favours evolutionary stability of commitment compliance and cooperation.

Evolutionary game analysis of environmental pollution control under the government regulation

This paper studied a tripartite evolutionary game of stakeholders in environmental pollution control. Most previous studies on this issue are limited to a focus on system dynamics with two-party game problems and lack a spatial analysis of strategy evolution. The parameters adopted are too few, and the influencing factors considered are too simple. The purpose of the paper is to introduce more parameters to study, which will have an important impact on the strategy choices of participants and the evolution path of the strategy over time. We construct a tripartite evolutionary game model of sewage enterprises, governments and the public. We establish a payment matrix and replicator equations as our method, and we also implement parameter simulations in MATLAB. In summary, we found that the reward and punishment mechanism plays an important role in environmental pollution control. Specifically: intensifying rewards and penalties will help encourage sewage enterprises to meet the discharge standard and the public to participate in pollution control action. However, increased rewards will reduce government's willingness to adopt incentive strategies; Government's reward for public's participation in the action must be greater than the increased cost of participation; Reducing the cost of sewage enterprise can also encourage them to implement standard emissions. The research presented in this paper further improves standard emissions and designs reasonable reward and punishment mechanism.