Collective risk social dilemmas are at the heart of the most pressing global challenges we are facing today, including climate change mitigation and the overuse of natural resources. Previous research has framed this problem as a public goods game (PGG), where a dilemma arises between short-term interests and long-term sustainability. In the PGG, subjects are placed in groups and asked to choose between cooperation and defection, while keeping in mind their personal interests as well as the commons. Here, we explore how and to what extent the costly punishment of defectors is successful in enforcing cooperation by means of human experiments. We show that an apparent irrational underestimation of the risk of being punished plays an important role, and that for sufficiently high punishment fines, this vanishes and the threat of deterrence suffices to preserve the commons. Interestingly, however, we find that high fines not only avert freeriders, but they also demotivate some of the most generous altruists. As a consequence, the tragedy of the commons is predominantly averted due to cooperators that contribute only their “fair share” to the common pool. We also find that larger groups require larger fines for the deterrence of punishment to have the desired prosocial effect.
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April 2023
Research Article|
April 13 2023
Deterrence through punishment can resolve collective risk dilemmas in carbon emission games
Luo-Luo Jiang;
Luo-Luo Jiang
(Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
1
School of Information Management and Artificial Intelligence, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics
, Hangzhou 310018, China
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Zhi Chen
;
Zhi Chen
a)
(Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
2
Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China
, Hefei 230026, China
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Matjaž Perc
;
Matjaž Perc
b)
(Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
3
Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor
, Koroška cesta 160, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia
; Department of Medical Research, China Medical University Hospital, China Medical University
, Taichung 404332, Taiwan
; Alma Mater Europaea
, Slovenska ulica 17, 2000, Maribor, Slovenia
; Complexity Science Hub Vienna
, Josefstädterstraße 39, 1080 Vienna, Austria
; and Department of Physics, Kyung Hee University
, 26 Kyungheedae-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
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Zhen Wang
;
Zhen Wang
(Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
4
School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics, and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University
, Xi’an 710072, China
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Jürgen Kurths
;
Jürgen Kurths
(Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
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Yamir Moreno
Yamir Moreno
c)
(Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
5
Institute for Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), University of Zaragoza
, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
; Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Zaragoza
, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
; and CENTAI Institute
, 10138 Turin, Italy
c)Author to whom correspondence should be addressed: yamir.moreno@gmail.com
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c)Author to whom correspondence should be addressed: yamir.moreno@gmail.com
Note: This paper is part of the Focus Issue on Nonlinear dynamics, synchronization and networks: Dedicated to Juergen Kurths' 70th birthday.
Chaos 33, 043127 (2023)
Article history
Received:
February 20 2023
Accepted:
March 24 2023
Citation
Luo-Luo Jiang, Zhi Chen, Matjaž Perc, Zhen Wang, Jürgen Kurths, Yamir Moreno; Deterrence through punishment can resolve collective risk dilemmas in carbon emission games. Chaos 1 April 2023; 33 (4): 043127. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0147226
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