Excessive abundance of common resources deters social responsibility

TL;DR

This paper investigates how excessive common resources hinder cooperation in a collective-risk dilemma, emphasizing the importance of balanced resource levels for sustaining social responsibility.

Contribution

It introduces a feedback mechanism linking resource abundance to cooperative contributions, revealing that too many resources undermine cooperation.

Findings

Cooperation is sustainable only with balanced resource levels.

Excessive resources lead to the collapse of cooperation.

Resource thresholds critically influence collective outcomes.

Abstract

We study the evolution of cooperation in the collective-risk social dilemma game, where the risk is determined by a collective target that must be reached with individual contributions. All players initially receive endowments from the available amount of common resources. While cooperators contribute part of their endowment to the collective target, defectors do not. If the target is not reached, the endowments of all players are lost. In our model, we introduce a feedback between the amount of common resources and the contributions of cooperators. We show that cooperation can be sustained only if the common resources are preserved but never excessively abound. This, however, requires a delicate balance between the amount of common resources that initially exist, and the amount cooperators contribute to the collective target. Exceeding critical thresholds in either of the two amounts leads to loss of cooperation, and consequently to the depletion of common resources.