title: Cooperating with the future.
abstract: Overexploitation of renewable resources today has a high cost on the welfare of future generations. Unlike in other public goods games, 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. Voting is effective for two reasons. First, it allows a majority of cooperators to restrain defectors. Second, it reassures conditional cooperators 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.
authors.affiliation: 1] Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [2] Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [3].
authors.forename: Oliver P
authors.initials: OP
authors.lastname: Hauser
authors.affiliation: 1] Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA [2] Department of Economics, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA [3].
authors.forename: David G
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Rand
authors.affiliation: 1] Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [2] Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, USA.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Peysakhovich
authors.affiliation: 1] Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [2] Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA [3] Department of Mathematics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
authors.forename: Martin A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Nowak
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003657:Decision Making; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D016901:Intergenerational Relations; D011057:Politics; D040841:Resource Allocation