Social Dilemmas and Cooperation

Social dilemmas (sometimes referred to as “problems of collective action”, “tragedy of the commons”, or “public goods problems”) are situations with strategically interdependent actors such that individually rational behavior leads to an outcome that is less desirable for each actor than had they cooperated. In this chapter, we provide an overview of models of social dilemmas and cooperation in social dilemmas that use game-theoretic tools. We first review examples of social dilemmas and formal modeling of such dilemmas. We distinguish between dilemmas that involve two actors and those that can involve more than two actors. We also discuss why the conceptualization of “social dilemma” is “theory dependent”. Second, we review mechanisms that can induce cooperation in social dilemmas. Cooperation of rational actors in a social dilemma requires that the dilemma is “embedded” in a more complex game. We discuss models for different types of embeddedness. The chapter likewise includes a sketch of models of cooperation based on social preferences and of simulation studies as an alternative to game-theoretic analysis.