Reciprocity and the tragedies of maintaining and providing the commons

Gaechter, Simon (2018). Reciprocity and the tragedies of maintaining and providing the commons. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852841

This network project brings together economists, psychologists, computer and complexity scientists from three leading centres for behavioural social science at Nottingham, Warwick and UEA. This group will lead a research programme with two broad objectives: to develop and test cross-disciplinary models of human behaviour and behaviour change; draw out their implications for the formulation and evaluation of public policy.
Foundational research will focus on three inter-related themes: understanding individual behaviour and behaviour change; understanding social and interactive behaviour; rethinking the foundations of policy analysis.
The project will explore implications of the basic science for policy via a series of applied projects connecting naturally with the three themes. These will include: the determinants of consumer credit behaviour; the formation of social values; strategies for evaluation of policies affecting health and safety.
The research will integrate theoretical perspectives from multiple disciplines and utilise a wide range of complementary methodologies including: theoretical modeling of individuals, groups and complex systems; conceptual analysis; lab and field experiments; analysis of large data sets.
The Network will promote high quality cross-disciplinary research and serve as a policy forum for understanding behaviour and behaviour change.

Data description (abstract)

Social cooperation often requires collectively beneficial but individually costly restraint to maintain a public good 1,2,3,4, or it needs costly generosity to create one 1,5. Status quo effects 6 predict that maintaining a public good is easier than providing a new one. Here, we show experimentally and with simulations that even under identical incentives, low levels of cooperation (the ‘tragedy of the commons’2) are systematically more likely in maintenance than provision. Across three series of experiments, we find that strong and weak positive reciprocity, known to be fundamental tendencies underpinning human cooperation 7,8,9,10, are substantially diminished under maintenance compared with provision. As we show in a fourth experiment, the opposite holds for negative reciprocity (‘punishment’). Our findings suggest that incentives to avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’ need to contend with dilemma-specific reciprocity.

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