Abstract
One of the main aims of this and the next two chapters is to study cooperative behavior in various kinds of interaction situations. Both cooperation based on collective goals (g-goals) and cooperation based on “private” goals (i-goals) will be concerned. The participants are viewed as “normally” rational agents who interact, usually, in view of their i-goals and i-preferences and i-goals. As other agents are present, there can be an element of strategic thinking-something like rational utilization of the interaction situation in question so as to satisfy one’s i-preferences.
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Notes
Elster’s claim that the present case of erosion is individually inaccessible, however, is problematic. Consider a two-person situation. Suppose one of the agents goes out and starts planting trees. At least if the preferences are mutually known to the players — as is assumed in game theory — the other player will have an incentive to join in. But this also means that the first player originally can have reasoned so and thus have had an incentive to start planting; and thus the cooperative outcome can be argued to be individually accessible, after all. Many-person situations, although more complex, can be handled analogously.
Economists seem to use the notion of a collective good and public good interchangeably (cf. Nicholson, 1992, p. 747). A public good is one which satisfies the two conditions of indivisibility of benefits (or, equivalently, nonrivalry of consumption) and the nonexcludability of benefits. “A good is nonrival or indivisible when a unit of the good can be consumed by one individual without detracting, in the slightest, from the consumption opportunities still available to others from that same unit.” “Goods whose benefits can be withheld costlessly by the owner or provider generate excludable benefits.” (Cornes and Sandler, 1996, pp. 8–9). A good is nonexcludable just in case it is not excludable. Consider the idealized notion of indivisibility. It seems best construed as an “ontological notion”, for it concerns the existential nature of the good. Standard examples of indivisible goods such as national security or clean air or sunsets are concerned with properties of an external good. By analogy, knowledge (such as that E=mc2) is also indivisible. In contrast, a loaf of bread is divisible. As to nonexcludability, we construe it as an enforceable normative notion. Thus a good is excludable for an agent in a collective C if and only if there is some agent in C who can be forbidden to consume this good, and the proscription here is enforceable by the authority controlling its use. A good which is indivisible but excludable is called a club good by economist’s (cf. a golf club permitting golf playing only to its members).
My notion of a collective action dilemma is somewhat broader than is common in this field. For comparison, let me reproduce what Liebrand et al. (1992) say about “social dilemmas” (p. 4): “Social dilemmas can be defined as situations in which each decision maker is best off acting in his own interest, regardless of what the other persons do. Each self-interested decision however, creates a negative outcome or cost for the other people who are involved. When a large number of people make the self-interested choice, the costs or negative outcomes accumulate, creating a situation in which everybody would have done better had they decided not to act in their own private interest.” “Formally, social dilemmas are defined by three properties: 1) a noncooperative choice (D) is always more profitable to the actor than a cooperative choice (C), regardless of the choices made by the others; 2) compared to a cooperative choice, a noncooperative choice is always harmful to the others: and 3) the aggregate amount of harm done to others by a noncooperative choice is greater that the profit to the actor himself.” This account fits, e.g., the central types of dilemma explicated by the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Chicken, but primarily because of clause 1) it does not fit the Assurance Game or the Imitation Game (see Section III below).
Olson (1965) is famous for defending a number of claims about public goods and their provision, especially that large groups can at best provide suboptimal levels of public goods. I have reconstructed and critically discussed some of them in Tuomela (1984), Chapter 5. For a good recent evaluation of Olson’s claims, see Sandler (1992) and Cornes and Sandler (1996). Let me here mention some of Olson’s theses for a reader not familiar his work (cf. Cornes and Sandler (1996), p. 325): a) Large groups cannot provide themselves a public good. Therefore, no individual or coalition within the group may satisfy the sufficient condition for a privileged group (a group which can rationally alone provide itself the good). b) The larger the group, the greater the departure of (Nash) equilibrium behavior from Pareto optimality. c) The larger the group, the smaller the collective provision level. d) Large, well-endowed members will bear a disproportionately great burden of collective provision, viz., the small will exploit the large. e) The provision of public goods can be promoted through selective incentives and institutional design. None of these theses is true in all cases. However, with suitable qualifications they can all be argued to be true, c), however, only in special conditions (see Sandler, 1992).
Let me characterize the notion of an objective free riding situation somewhat more precisely. Admitting that the details might be put differently, I here make the following simple proposal: (FRS) S is a situation of free riding in a collective g relative to a public good to be produced by a joint action X if and only if 1) there is a mutual normative belief among the full-fledged and adequately informed members of g (because of a joint decision, agreement, or a social norm) to the effect that each full-fledged and adequately informed member ought to contribute to the production of the public good by doing his part of X; 2) everyone in g will gain more from defection (doing D) than from contribution (doing C) if at least K agents contribute, viz., if at least K agents out of N do C, K being the minimal number of agents capable of jointly performing X.
the outcome resulting from all the agents contributing (doing C), is better than the outcome when all defect (do D). 4) anybody’s defection involves a cost (possibly nil) to the contributing members of G. We may also discuss conditional intentions to free ride. In such cases the intention in the first clause is some contingent condition, e.g., that at least K other members contribute. Let us now consider the mentioned situation: the condition that at least K other members contribute may be i) sufficient, ii) necessary and sufficient, iii) necessary, or iv) it, together with some other conditions — left implicit in clause 4) — is necessary and sufficient. Consider i), the case where A has the intention to defect if at least K others contribute. This allows for the possibility that A contributes if fewer than K others participate (and in particular in the critical case where K-1 others contribute), and A may then also contribute on the basis of his we-intention to do X. (At least it is rational for A to form the we-intention to cooperate, for in this case cooperation simply is more valuable to him than defection.) Case i) represents a typical case of free riding. With fewer than K other participants, the agent may often decide on the basis of the costs of participation and the expected gains of participation whether he will participate, and the present possibility leaves open the results of such deliberation. The case ii) where A intends to defect if and only if at least K other members participate is a strong one. It requires A to participate when less than K others participate. Supposing that intentional participation in a collective or joint action requires the we-intention to perform that joint action, we have here the somewhat special combination of a we-intention to cooperate (when fewer than K other persons participate) and an intention defect (when at least K other persons participate). In the third case iii) no commitment to defection follows from the fulfillment of the condition, viz., that A defects only if at least K others contribute. This case involves that A is committed to participation if less than K other persons participate and he is needed (this is the case if K-l others participate — and in our present setup only then). If at least K others participate he can decide whether to cooperate or to defect; in the case of a rational agent that clearly depends on the production function of the public good in question and of course on which particular values of its argument the agent will at that moment have to consider. Also case iv) seems rather typical — in this case A still requires that some further conditions hold before forming the intention to defect. Do the above cases i)—iv) all qualify for representing free riding as we normally understand this notion? The answer is positive in the case of i) and ii), for in their case the agent satisfying our analysans of (FR) will indeed under normal circumstances intentionally free ride (precisely with the free rider’s reason of gaining something due to what the others do) if the collective good is provided by the others. Also iii) and iv) seem acceptable, keeping in mind that we are dealing with a disposition to free ride. In fact, iv) is not problematic here at all. Case iii) is problematic and even unacceptable if A believes that there cannot be any further conditions, which, when added to the present one would make him free ride. For then we presumably would not say that A is disposed to free ride — and it is just this disposition we are trying to analyze here.
Cf. Tuomela (1984, pp. 141–144), and Sandu and Tuomela (1996). In the latter work it is argued that — with some qualifications — all joint actions can be logically presented with the help of joint result-states in terms of the logical operations of conjunction, disjunction, parallelity and seriality (or the “and then” operation) and their Boolean combinations, these notions taken in the sense of dynamic logic. With equal force, it can be argued that all collective goals can be similarly represented. (I do not see any important differences between joint goals and collective goals in this respect.) Thus collective actions can also be analogously presented and classified.
Hampton (1987) claims that Hume’s meadow draining example represents BS. This is not right. I have claimed that, depending on one’s special assumptions, it can be made a CG or a PD-like situation. On p. 252 of her paper, Hampton explicitly assumes that DDD cannot be ranked lowest. Thus, BS is excluded.
The linear decomposition assumption, formula (8) in Chapter 8, is, for i = l,...,r, j = l,...,c, and h= 1,2: Uijh = mh + aih + tjh + eijh where uijh is agent h’s utility at the i’th row and the j’th column in the matrix of given utilities (in the sense of Chapters 3 and 8). I shall below restrict our formal treatment to the case with two agents, A1 and A2 or 1 and 2, for short.
Considering other-regarding final utilities, we notice that, for instance, the expression a12–a22 measures 2’s preference concerning 1’s actions (in the terminology of Chapter 8). Thus, 1’s actions can be said to be a utility source for 2 (and vice versa). Even more can be involved here. For the fact that 1’s actions have certain utility for 2 can and will also be evaluated by 1 in a certain way (when the utilities u’ijh are at stake). In other words, we have a kind of social utility-loop here: l’s utility is a function of 2’s utility, which again is a function of l’s utility. That is, in our example the fact that agent 2 values agent l’s action X1 to the degree v has the operative value v’ to 1 (u’ 1 meaning utility for 1 generally). To this, we can add that our general mutual awareness requirement ensures that not only is agent 2 aware of the fact that a12 = v but agent 1 is aware of the whole content of (*). In this kind of situation we can say that I love you because you love me. However, we can have even more: I love you (in part) because you love me (in part) because I love you; and so on.
Stein (1990) discusses the effect of utility transformations in the context of the relative gain and the joint gain criteria.
Stein claims this: “Situations in which different strategies emerge as dominant for individualistic and competitive orientations are those in which the actor with the dilemma has a greater impact over the other’s returns than its own. That is, it has greater fate control [viz., control over the other’s utilities] than reflexive control [viz,, control over one’s own utilities].” (Stein, 1990, p. 139). Put in exact terms this amounts to the following (pp. 147–148): Consider next another claim by Stein concerning the joint gain transformation in the context of alliances between states (p. 164): “Only when the consequences of a state’s choices have more of an effect on others than on itself will it be torn between a dominant strategy of maximizing its own interest and one of maximizing the interest of the group. It is such an asymmetry of import that is at the root of dilemmas of entanglement”. A dilemma of entanglement is one where “individualistic self-interest points in a different direction from conjoint interest” (p. 163). Both of Stein’s claims can be shown to be right (I will leave the simple algebraic proofs as an exercise for the reader). However, his own proofs for them are not satisfactory, for he fails to use all of the needed assumptions and even uses two different definitions of fate control.
The mentioned features relate to the absolute control over the other participants (this can represent conflict and exchange) or to the conditional control of some kind between them (selection, coordination), and it should not be forgotten that also the agents’ reflexive control (viz., their control over their own utilities) can be relevant (cf. Tuomela, 1989a).
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Tuomela, R. (2000). Cooperation and the Dilemma of Collective Action. In: Cooperation. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 82. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9594-0_10
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