Emergence of cooperation in a coupled socio-ecological system through a direct or an indirect social control mechanism

Abstract

The successful management of a common pool resource (CPR) by its social agents is key to its sustainability. In order to maintain the ecological resource of such a coupled socio-ecological system, cooperative effort from the whole society is required and this necessitates proper social control mechanism to regulate the social order. In this paper, we explore the effects of two social control mechanisms: ostracism and voluntary enforcement, on agents that actively exploit the CPR within societies of different social network structures (as encapsulated by its average network degree). By means of numerical simulations and analytical approximation, we made inference on the dynamical behavior of the system in terms of its phase diagram. The phase diagram is found to contain a plethora of phases and associated phase transitions as we enumerate them based on a social and an ecological parameter. At a large average network degree, the features of the phases are observed to be similar for the direct voluntary enforcement and indirect ostracism mechanisms. However, these features exhibit a unique difference at low average network degree, where we uncover a new phenomenon of nonequilibrium oscillatory phase attributed to the voluntary enforcement mechanism.

Punishment and inspection for governing the commons in a feedback-evolving game

“…Conceptually similar conclusion can also be obtained when ostracism is introduced as a collective control mechanisms into another coupled social-resource model proposed by Tavoni et al [15]. It is found that the stationary state of cooperators and defectors does not only depend on the ostracism strength, but also on the resource inflow [33]. We thus conclude that when we design a social control mechanism to solve the overexploitation problem in a coupled social-resource system we should first pay attention to the intrinsic features of the system which can determine in advance whether the designed control mechanism is capable to drive the level of common resource toward the desired direction.…”

“…In this more realistic model of a coupled social-resource system, we further introduce a top-down-like control mechanism that serves to block overexploitation of the common resource. This control mechanism is not only motivated by theoretical works or lab experiments [20,33,46], but is also stimulated by realistic field investigations focusing on the forest commons management [34,47]. In contrast to a bottom-up self-regulation this top-down-type control assumes an effective external monitoring of agents.…”

“…Renewable resources are generally believed to play key roles in achieving a sustainable human development [48]. Indeed, they are essential but we must consider not only temporal changes in environmental conditions but also their intrinsic features when designing their sustainable usage [33]. Otherwise our additional efforts to control participants become useless.…”

“…A frequently recommend solution for sustaining the requested level of common-pool resource could be to punish defectors for over-harvesting [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. In parallel, some other related control mechanisms, like ostracism or voluntary enforcement, are also discussed as viable solutions to the original problem [32,33]. Importantly, the consequence of top-down regulation, which is based on inspection, permanent monitoring of agents and punishment, has been used for the forest commons management [34], but still begs for clarification especially in the presence of renewable resources.…”

Combination of institutional incentives for cooperative governance of risky commons

“…This consideration of the enforcement strategy as a voluntary enforcement involves a more complex three-strategy system. Indeed, this is a kind of a bottom-up self-regulation for influencing the evolution of cooperation ( Sugiarto et al., 2017 ). We stress that this approach is different from the top-down-like incentive mechanism used in previous works ( Chen et al., 2015 ; Góis et al., 2019 ), in which cooperators can be rewarded and defectors can be punished directly by external centralized institutions.…”