Journal
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
Volume 7, Issue 7, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.201026
Keywords
evolutionary game theory; social dilemma; cooperation; conservation; sustainability
Categories
Funding
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [20H04288]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [U1836106]
- Government of Aragon, Spain [E36-20R]
- Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO)
- European Fund for Regional Development [FIS2017-87519-P]
- European Commission's Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Proactive projects [640772, 662725]
- University of Zaragoza [2015/022PIP]
- Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [20H04288] Funding Source: KAKEN
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Common-pool resources require a dose of self-restraint to ensure sustainable exploitation, but this has often proven elusive in practice. To understand why, and characterize behaviours towards ecological systems in general, we devised a social dilemma experiment in which participants gain profit from harvesting a virtual forest vulnerable to overexploitation. Out of 16 Chinese and 15 Spanish player groups, only one group from each country converged to the forest's maximum sustainable yield. All other groups were overzealous, with about half of them surpassing or on the way to surpass a no-recovery threshold. Computational-statistical analyses attribute such outcomes to an interplay between three prominent player behaviours, two of which are subject to decision-making 'inertia' that causes near blindness to the resource state. These behaviours, being equally pervasive among players from both nations, imply that the commons fall victim to behavioural patterns robust to confounding factors such as age, education and culture.
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