Why cooperate

Search the catalogue for collection items held by the National Library of Australia. Find out more Barrett, Scott. Why cooperate? Using a variety of examples to illustrate past successes and failures, he shows how international cooperation, institutional design, and the clever use of incentives can work together to ensure the effective delivery of global public goods.

Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card. To learn more about how to request items watch this short online video. You can view this on the NLA website. Login Register. Current search limits: Clear format limits. Advanced search Search history. Browse titles authors subjects uniform titles series callnumbers dewey numbers starting from optional. But recently, researchers have begun to think about a much wider range of strategies, and a more complex picture has emerged.

In fact, in the long run, no one behavior cooperate or defect dominates forever. Instead, when we focus on the dynamics of strategies over time, what emerges is a picture of constant flux.

People may choose cooperative strategies, but these are slowly replaced by defector or selfish strategies, which in turn are eroded and replaced. The reason for this flux is a naturally emerging complacency: when everybody cooperates, there is no need to worry about these defectors call them rebels without a cause who go against the grain. Players are free to try out new strategies — such as never punishing a defector — and in the short term they suffer no cost.

But when such a complacent strategy takes hold, the whole population is open to exploitation by defectors, and so cooperation is lost. Despite this constant turnover, we can still try to determine what kinds of behavior dominate on average. Fortunately for society, what we find is that much of the time it is cooperation that will dominate. The turnover between cooperators and defectors may be unavoidable, but still cooperation is the rule. However, this depends critically on keeping the costs and benefits of cooperation fixed.

And in general, they are not. We constantly change the way we incentivize cooperation. A new government comes to power, a new manager wants to make their mark, a new book on childrearing is read by a parent. In everyday life, cooperation between people involves some cost — such as work effort — and comes with some reward — a better product than anyone could have created alone.

The incentives are the rewards; the costs are what individuals contribute to attaining them. Typically, benefits and rewards vary together; the more effort people put into cooperating, the greater the rewards they get from the interaction. In an evolving game, this leads players to not only change their strategies but also the effort they put in when they do choose to cooperate.

This might seem like a good thing — members of a team not just cooperating but going that extra mile to get the best results possible. Unfortunately once strategies, costs and benefits start to co-evolve, something counter-intuitive can happen: cooperation starts to collapse. Suppose everyone in the team really does go the extra mile when they work on a project. This is exactly what we see in evolving games — cooperating players contribute ever greater effort to cooperation, only to make it easier for defectors to take hold.

This presents something of a paradox, because it means the more we cooperate, the less likely others are to do the same. All of which raises questions about how to incentivize cooperation. On the one hand we find that it is impossible to guarantee that members of a group will always cooperate in the long run, but we can often ensure a lot of cooperation on average if we get the payoffs right.

On the other hand if we incentivize cooperation too much, we paradoxically encourage defection at the same time. The evolutionary approach to game theory analysis cannot tell us precisely how to get the right balance between encouraging cooperation and defection, but it does reveal that there are steep costs to over-incentivizing. This article is published in collaboration with The Conversation.

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Contents Go to page:. View: no detail some detail full detail. Introduction: the incentives to supply global public goods. Chapter One Single best efforts: global public goods that can be supplied unilaterally or minilaterally. Chapter Two Weakest links: global public goods that depend on the states that contribute the least. Chapter Three Aggregate efforts: global public goods that depend on the combined efforts of all states. Chapter Four Financing and burden sharing: paying for global public goods.

Chapter Five Mutual restraint: agreeing what states ought not to do. Chapter Six Coordination and global standards: agreeing what states ought to do. Chapter Seven Development: do global public goods help poor states?