Public goods benefit us all, but the very nature of them render the tragedy of the commons an all too real problem. Protection generally requires a collective effort, but securing this participation can be difficult, as people often leave it to others.
Research from Tokyo Institute of Technology uses an experimental game to show how giving people the ability to choose their preferred public goods increases participation rates because it increases the value we place on those goods.
Previous research suggests that participation rates typically hover around 50%, but this decreases over time as more people free ride on the goodwill of others. Some have suggested that social networks can help to limit this free riding, but evidence has been minimal of this in action in reality.
Social dilemmas
The researchers conducted a social-dilemma experiment that aimed to reveal just what drives participation in people. The experiment consisted of a game that was played by nearly 600 participants who were split across three distinct social network configurations and two experimental conditions.
Each of the players were only able to decide whether they wanted to support public goods provision or not, with a decision to participate contributing one unit of wealth to each of the public goods within their reach. The total contributions would then be multiplied by an interest rate and split equally between both the actual contributors and those who chose to free ride, thus creating a condition in which free riders could benefit from the effort of others.
The experiment revealed that local conditions were crucial, and typically more important than the characteristics of one’s social network. For instance, allowing players to distribute their wealth freely tended to increase participation, as well as motivating better provisioning.
“This is surprising! We expected initial participation to be similar under both control and treatment conditions,” the researchers explain. “Only later in the game did we expect gradual learning and optimization from players who could choose freely. We observed that increased participation in public-goods provision happens from the very first round of the game, as if the players could feel that extra freedoms weaken the underlying dilemma of whether to participate or not. Over time, more participation leads to more wealth, generating something akin to a free lunch for players under treatment conditions.”
Personality types
Three clear behavioral types emerged throughout the experiment:
- Prosocial players, who would typically participate unconditionally
- Antisocial players, who would mostly piggyback on the efforts of others
- Conditional cooperators, who would often refuse to participate when there were no other people around
By fostering freedom of choice, it seemed to encourage greater conditional cooperation, with the experiment underlining the importance of providing players with clear signals regarding their surroundings so they can better understand the cooperativeness of their neighbors. It’s a finding that the researchers believe could have a number of implications.
“Policymakers, for instance, could facilitate raising residential taxes by offering a portfolio of public goods for taxpayers to choose from,” they suggest. “And by doing so, voters could decouple long-term, life-improving, public-goods projects from the whims and fancies of political election cycles.”
