Reciprocity and the tragedies of maintaining and providing the commons

Simon Gächter, Felix Kölle and Simone Quercia

Nature Human Behaviour, 2017, vol. 1, issue 9, 650-656

Abstract: Abstract Social cooperation often requires collectively beneficial but individually costly restraint to maintain a public good 1–4 , 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 7–10 , 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.

Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0191-5

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