Cooperating with the future (original) (raw)

Nature volume 511, pages 220–223 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

Overexploitation of renewable resources today has a high cost on the welfare of future generations1,2,3,4,5. Unlike in other public goods games6,7,8,9, however, future generations cannot reciprocate actions made today. What mechanisms can maintain cooperation with the future? To answer this question, we devise a new experimental paradigm, the ‘Intergenerational Goods Game’. A line-up of successive groups (generations) can each either extract a resource to exhaustion or leave something for the next group. Exhausting the resource maximizes the payoff for the present generation, but leaves all future generations empty-handed. Here we show that the resource is almost always destroyed if extraction decisions are made individually. This failure to cooperate with the future is driven primarily by a minority of individuals who extract far more than what is sustainable. In contrast, when extractions are democratically decided by vote, the resource is consistently sustained. Voting10,11,12,13,[14](/articles/nature13530#ref-CR14 "Kamei, K., Putterman, L. & Tyran, J.-R. State or nature? Formal vs. informal sanctioning in the voluntary provision of public goods. Exp. Econ. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9405-0

             (2014)"),[15](/articles/nature13530#ref-CR15 "Bernard, M., Dreber, A., Strimling, P. & Eriksson, K. The subgroup problem: When can binding voting on extractions from a common pool resource overcome the tragedy of the commons? J. Econ. Behav. Organ. 91, 122–130 (2013)") is effective for two reasons. First, it allows a majority of cooperators to restrain defectors. Second, it reassures conditional cooperators[16](/articles/nature13530#ref-CR16 "Fischbacher, U., Gächter, S. & Fehr, E. Are people conditionally cooperative? Evidence from a public goods experiment. Econ. Lett. 71, 397–404 (2001)") that their efforts are not futile. Voting, however, only promotes sustainability if it is binding for all involved. Our results have implications for policy interventions designed to sustain intergenerational public goods.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Dreber for discussion and three anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback. Financial support from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, the Harvard Office for Sustainability and the John Templeton Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.

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Author notes

  1. Oliver P. Hauser and David G. Rand: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA
    Oliver P. Hauser, Alexander Peysakhovich & Martin A. Nowak
  2. Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA
    Oliver P. Hauser & Martin A. Nowak
  3. Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, 06511, Connecticut, USA
    David G. Rand & Alexander Peysakhovich
  4. Department of Economics, Yale University, New Haven, 06511, Connecticut, USA
    David G. Rand
  5. Department of Mathematics, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA
    Martin A. Nowak

Authors

  1. Oliver P. Hauser
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  2. David G. Rand
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  3. Alexander Peysakhovich
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  4. Martin A. Nowak
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Contributions

O.P.H., D.G.R., A.P. and M.A.N. designed and performed the experiments, analysed the data and wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence toMartin A. Nowak.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Figure 1 Bootstrapping simulations demonstrate the robustness of full voting and the failure of partial voting.

We address sources of noise in the sequence of events that occurred in our experiment by conducting a set of computer simulations using the data generated by our participants. We randomly sample (with replacement) a series of generations of participant decisions, and calculate the fraction of those generations in which the pool was refilled. For each condition, we simulate 10,000 pools (or 1,000,000 pools if δ < 0.8) for 15 generations. a, Simulated data for the unregulated, full voting and partial voting conditions show that full voting is by far the most successful at sustaining the pool. b, Simulated data for the T = 40%, T = 30%, δ = 0.7 and δ = 0.6 conditions shows that reducing δ has only a small effect, and although reducing T does undermine sustainability, the effect is much less striking than that of unregulated or partial voting despite the higher value of T in these less-regulated conditions.

Extended Data Figure 2 Countries with more democratic governments have more sustainable energy policies.

Energy sustainability index (as measured by the World Energy organization) is shown as a function of the democracy index (as measured by The Economist Intelligence Unit) for n = 128 countries. A strong positive association is clearly visible, and this association is robust to controlling for gross domestic product (GDP), Gini index, population size, literacy rate, unemployment rate, life expectancy and level of corruption. Thus we provide preliminary empirical support for the role of democracy in promoting sustainability outside the laboratory. We adopt the colouring and naming scheme from The Economist Intelligence Unit’s classification of regimes.

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Hauser, O., Rand, D., Peysakhovich, A. et al. Cooperating with the future.Nature 511, 220–223 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13530

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Editorial Summary

A caring majority votes for the future

Cooperation is often seen in experimental economic games because actions can be reciprocated. But this trait is of no help in one of the most important types of cooperation: cooperation with future generations who cannot reciprocate if we refrain from overexploiting their resources. To test the conditions under which cooperation with the future can occur, Oliver Hauser et al. developed a laboratory model of cooperation — the Intergenerational Goods Game (IGG) — that differs from previous games in which selfishness creates social efficiency losses for group members. Instead, selfishness negatively impacts subsequent groups. Experiments involving more than 2,000 subjects demonstrate that when decisions on resource extraction are made individually, the resource is rapidly depleted by defectors. But when participants are forced to vote on how the resource should be exploited, it is exploited sustainably across generations. Voting works for two reasons. It allows a majority of cooperators to constrain a minority of defectors, and as all players receive the same amount after a vote, cooperators need not worry about losing out relative to others.

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