Emergence of Cooperation in Group Interactions: Avoidance vs. Restriction

Public goods, like food sharing and social health systems, may prosper when prior agreements to contribute are feasible and all participants commit to do so. Yet, free-riders may exploit such agreements, requiring then committers to decide whether to enact the public good when others do not commit. So deciding removes all benefits from free-riders but also from those who are willing to establish the beneficial resource. Here we discuss our work wherein we show, within the framework of the one-shot Public Goods Game (PGG) and using methods of Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), that (i) implementing extra measures, delimiting benefits to free-riders, often leads to more favorable societal outcomes, especially in larger groups and highly beneficial public goods situations, even if so doing is costlier, and (ii) when restriction mechanism is not available, participation level (i.e. how many other players commit to the PGG cooperation) plays a crucial role in the decision making of commitment proposers, for their survival as well as for promoting the emergence of cooperation. Hence, there exist ethical fine tunings to be observed whenever establishing PGGs, be they for humans or non-humans, for otherwise the supporting joint moral ground may escape from under everyone’s feet.