Coalition-structured governance improves cooperation to provide public goods

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Vasconcelos, Vítor V., Hannam, Phillip M., Levin, Simon A., Pacheco, Jorge M.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2019
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author Vasconcelos, Vítor V.
Hannam, Phillip M.
Levin, Simon A.
Pacheco, Jorge M.
author_facet Vasconcelos, Vítor V.
Hannam, Phillip M.
Levin, Simon A.
Pacheco, Jorge M.
contents While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges, ranging from local fisheries to global climate change. In the real world, such cooperative dilemmas occur in multiple interactions with complex strategic interests and frequently without full information. We argue that voluntary cooperation enabled across multiple coalitions (akin to polycentricity) not only facilitates greater generation of non-excludable public goods, but may also allow evolution toward a more cooperative, stable, and inclusive approach to governance. Contrary to any previous study, we show that these merits of multi-coalition governance are far more general than the singular examples occurring in the literature, and are robust under diverse conditions of excludability, congestability of the non-excludable public good, and arbitrary shapes of the return-to-contribution function. We first confirm the intuition that a single coalition without enforcement and with players pursuing their self-interest without knowledge of returns to contribution is prone to cooperative failure. Next, we demonstrate that the same pessimistic model but with a multi-coalition structure of governance experiences relatively higher cooperation by enabling recognition of marginal gains of cooperation in the game at stake. In the absence of enforcement, public-goods regimes that evolve through a proliferation of voluntary cooperative forums can maintain and increase cooperation more successfully than singular, inclusive regimes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1910_11337
institution arXiv
publishDate 2019
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Coalition-structured governance improves cooperation to provide public goods
Vasconcelos, Vítor V.
Hannam, Phillip M.
Levin, Simon A.
Pacheco, Jorge M.
General Economics
Economics
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
92-08, 91-08, 60J20, 60G10, 91C99, 91A06, 91A10, 91A22, 91A26, 91A40, 91A80
While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges, ranging from local fisheries to global climate change. In the real world, such cooperative dilemmas occur in multiple interactions with complex strategic interests and frequently without full information. We argue that voluntary cooperation enabled across multiple coalitions (akin to polycentricity) not only facilitates greater generation of non-excludable public goods, but may also allow evolution toward a more cooperative, stable, and inclusive approach to governance. Contrary to any previous study, we show that these merits of multi-coalition governance are far more general than the singular examples occurring in the literature, and are robust under diverse conditions of excludability, congestability of the non-excludable public good, and arbitrary shapes of the return-to-contribution function. We first confirm the intuition that a single coalition without enforcement and with players pursuing their self-interest without knowledge of returns to contribution is prone to cooperative failure. Next, we demonstrate that the same pessimistic model but with a multi-coalition structure of governance experiences relatively higher cooperation by enabling recognition of marginal gains of cooperation in the game at stake. In the absence of enforcement, public-goods regimes that evolve through a proliferation of voluntary cooperative forums can maintain and increase cooperation more successfully than singular, inclusive regimes.
title Coalition-structured governance improves cooperation to provide public goods
topic General Economics
Economics
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
92-08, 91-08, 60J20, 60G10, 91C99, 91A06, 91A10, 91A22, 91A26, 91A40, 91A80
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.11337