The shirker’s dilemma and the prospect of cooperation in large groups

Jorge Peña, Aviad Heifetz and Georg Nöldeke

No 23-152, IAST Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST)

Abstract: Cooperation usually becomes harder to sustain as groups become larger because incentives to shirk increase with the number of potential contributors to collective action. But is this always the case?Here we study a binary-action cooperative dilemma where a public good is provided as long as not more than a given number of players shirk from a costly cooperative task. We find that at the stable polymorphic equilibrium, which exists when the cost of cooperation is low enough, the probability of cooperating increases with group size and reaches a limit of one when the group size tends to infinity. Nevertheless, increasing the group size may increase or decrease the probability that the public good is provided at such an equilibrium, depending on the cost value. We also prove that the expected payoff to individuals at the stable equilibrium (i.e., their fitness) decreases with group size. For low enough costs of cooperation, both the probability of provision of the public good and the expected payoff converge to positive values in the limit of large group sizes. However, we also find that the basin of attraction of the stable polymorphic equilibrium is a decreasing function of group size and shrinks to zero in the limit of very large groups. Overall, we demonstrate non-trivial comparative statics with respect to group size in an otherwise simple collective action problem.

Keywords: replicator dynamics; evolutionary game theory; collective action; cooperation; group size (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-04-11, Revised 2023-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://iast.fr/pub/128025 null
https://www.iast.fr/sites/default/files/IAST/wp/wp_iast_152.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The shirker’s dilemma and the prospect of cooperation in large groups (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tse:iastwp:128025

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAST Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().