The emergence of cooperation from shared goals in the Systemic Sustainability Game of common pool resources

TL;DR

This paper investigates how shared goals among users of common-pool resources foster cooperation and sustainability, contrasting with selfish behaviors that cause resource depletion, supported by experiments and an analytical model.

Contribution

It introduces an online game experiment and an analytical model demonstrating the emergence of cooperation from shared goals in resource management.

Findings

Shared goals promote high cooperation levels

Selfish behaviors lead to resource depletion

Analytical model reproduces experimental results

Abstract

The sustainable use of common-pool resources (CPRs) is a major environmental governance challenge because of their possible over-exploitation. Research in this field has overlooked the feedback between user decisions and resource dynamics. Here we develop an online game to perform a set of experiments in which users of the same CPR decide on their individual harvesting rates, which in turn depend on the resource dynamics. We show that, if users share common goals, a high level of self-organized cooperation emerges, leading to long-term resource sustainability. Otherwise, selfish/individualistic behaviors lead to resource depletion ("Tragedy of the Commons"). To explain these results, we develop an analytical model of coupled resource-decision dynamics based on optimal control theory and show how this framework reproduces the empirical results.