Nonlinear behavior of the socio-economic dynamics for lake eutrophication control

To succeed in combating lake eutrophication, cooperation of local inhabitants, small factories, and farmers in reducing phosphorus discharge is very important. But the willingness of each player to cooperate would depend on the cooperation of other players and on the level of environmental concern of the society in general. Here we study the integrated dynamics of people's choice of behavior and the magnitude of eutrophication. Assumptions are: there are a number of players who choose between alternative options: a cooperative and environment-oriented option is more costly than the other. The decision of each player is affected by “social pressure” as well as by economical cost of the options. The lake pollution increases with the total phosphorus released, and a high pollution level in the lake would enhance the social pressure. The model includes a positive and a negative feedback loops which create diverse dynamical behavior. The model often shows bistability — having an equilibrium with a high level of cooperation among people and clean water, and the other equilibrium with low cooperation and polluted water, which are simultaneously stable. The model also shows fluctuation between a high and a low levels of cooperation in alternating years, cycle with a longer periodicity, or chaotic fluctuation. Conservatism of people stabilizes the system and sometimes helps maintaining cooperation. The system may show unexpected parameter dependence — the improved phosphorus removing efficiency might make water more polluted if it causes the decline in the environmental concern and cooperation among people.     

Strong,bold, and kind: self-control and cooperation in social dilemmas

We develop a model that relates self-control to cooperation patterns in social dilemmas, and we test the model in a laboratory public goods experiment. As predicted, we find a robust association between stronger self-control and higher levels of cooperation, and the association is at its strongest when the decision maker’s risk aversion is low and the cooperation levels of others high. We interpret the pattern as evidence for the notion that individuals may experience an impulse to act in self-interest—and that cooperative behavior benefits from self-control. Free-riders differ from other contributor types only in their tendency not to have identified a self-control conflict in the first place.     

Mandating behavioral conformity in social groups with conformist members

Social interaction among individuals with a preference for conformity gives rise to coordination externalities which are not internalized in a non-cooperative setting. Mandating behavioral conformity, by centrally imposing a common, group-wide action, internalizes these coordination externalities, but also comes at a cost of restraining individuals’ self-regarding goals. We explore a framework of social interaction among privately informed individuals with conformist preferences to examine when mandating behavioral conformity improves group welfare. Our analysis elucidates how the desirability of mandating behavioral conformity is shaped by the group's socio-economic structure. We find that mandating behavioral conformity is not desirable in social groups that are ex ante homogeneous—either with respect to members’ contribution to group welfare or their innate conformist tendency. In contrast, mandating behavioral conformity can be beneficial in those ex ante heterogeneous social groups where the individuals who contribute most to group welfare also exhibit the strongest preference for conformity.     

The Evolution of Cooperation in Structured Populations

The present paper analyses the evolution of costly cooperation in a multi-group population. Building on insights first developed in modern biology the idea of viscous population equilibria is introduced (a population is said to be viscous when a (sub)population of players is spatially or genetically clustered). A simple model then analyses how the combined effect of viscosity within multiple subgroups and different levels of between-group segregation influences the evolution of cooperation. The results suggest that a key issue in the evolution of cooperation is the shifting balance between the need to protect cooperators and propagation of the tendency to cooperate.     

Conceptualising environmental collective action: why gender matters

This paper demonstrates how institutions for natural resourcemanagement (such as community forestry groups), which appearto be participative, equitable and efficient, can be found lackingon all three counts from a gender perspective. It also examinespossible gender differences in social networks, values and motivations.Although there is little to suggest that women are inherentlymore conservationist than men, the distinctness of women's socialnetworks embodying prior experience of successful cooperation,their higher dependence on these networks (as also on the commonsin general), and their potentially greater group homogeneityrelative to men, could provide an important (and largely ignored)basis for organising sustainable environmental collective action.The paper also outlines the factors that can constrain or facilitatewomen's participation in formal environmental management groups.Illustrative examples are drawn from rural South Asia.     

Social context reveals gender differences in cooperative behavior

A number of previous researches indicate that men prefer competition over cooperation, and it is sometimes suggested that women show the opposite behavioral preference. In the current study the effects of social context on gender differences in cooperation are investigated. For the purpose, we compared men and women behavior under two social conditions: in groups of strangers and in groups with long-term socialization—groups of friends. The differences were found in changes in the level of cooperation, taking into account the effects of mixing social and gender variables. Social interaction and communication made cooperation of group members strength and sustainable. However, men’s and women’s cooperative behavior in groups differed. Women were initially more inclined to cooperate in interaction with strangers. Men showed greater sensitivity to sociality effects. They tended to make cooperative decisions more often if there were friends in the group. Furthermore, men cooperated with previously unknown people after socialization with them significantly more than women.     

Fiscal and monetary interactions when wage-setters are large: is there a role for corporatist policies?

This paper studies the macroeconomic consequences of alternative policy regimes in a closed economy where a central bank, a fiscal authority and a monopoly union interact via their effects on output and inflation. The analysis compares macroeconomic outcomes in a non-cooperative setting, where players may move sequentially or simultaneously, and in a regime of cooperation between the government and wage-setters. The cooperative regime captures a climate of accord among social parties that is finalised at common macroeconomic targets in the tradition of corporatism, as in the recent experience of “social pacts” in many European countries. The paper makes two main contributions. First, it shows that macroeconomic outcomes are suboptimal in the non-cooperative regime and may deliver extreme (undesirable) results even when all players share common ideal targets for output and inflation. All players would be better off with a less extreme value for output or inflation, yet they fail to reach a more advantageous allocation as long as there is an inherent conflict among their further objectives. Moreover, the result is robust to a change in the degree of central bank’s conservatism. Second, I find that cooperation between the government and the monopoly union towards common ideal targets for inflation, output and taxes enhances social welfare even in the absence of explicit coordination with the central bank.     

Learning in society

In an individual experimentation problem a decision maker learns only from his own experience. It is well known that an optimal experimentation strategy for such problems sometimes results in the best alternative being dropped altogether, which is the so-called “Rothschild effect.” Many experimentation problems of interest, however, involve learning from both individual experience and the experience of others. This paper shows that learning in society can overcome the Rothschild effect. We consider an economy with a continuum of infinitely lived players in which each player faces a multi-armed bandit and in each period a player observes the action choice of another randomly chosen player. We show that social conformity always happens in the long run, and we use this fact to derive a condition on the distribution of prior beliefs that implies that the fraction of players who choose the best alternative always converges to one in the long run.     

Cooperation and cultural transmission in a coordination game

The aim of this paper is to analyze if cooperation can be the product of cultural evolution in a two-stage coordination game, consisting of a production stage followed by a negotiation phase. We present an overlapping generations model with cultural transmission of preferences where the distribution of preferences in the population and the strategies are determined endogenously and simultaneously. There are several groups in the society; some of them play cooperatively and others do not. Socialization takes place inside the group, but there is a positive rate of migration among groups which parents anticipate. Our main result shows that all groups converge to the cooperative equilibrium.     

外部选择与关系专用性投资激励——基于GHM模型的研究

现实中的契约总是不完全的,当自然状态被参与人观察到之后,为了保证交易有效率,通常会对事前契约进行再谈判.首先,论文研究了事后再谈判时参与人的外部选择对事后合作租金的分配影响及事前关系专用性投资激励问题;其次,根据外部选择是否具有约束力,将外部选择区分为威胁点和现状点.研究结果显示:当外部选择为现状点时,不完全契约会导致事前关系专用性投资不足;而如果事后外部选择为威胁点时,投资方会作出有效率投资或投资过度     

On social norms and beliefs: A model of manager environmental behavior

A prevailing view in the literature states that social sanctions can support, in equilibrium, high levels of obedience to a costly norm. The reason is that social disapproval and stigmatization faced by the disobedient are highest when disobedience is the exception rather than the rule in society. In contrast, the Bayesian model introduced here shows that, imperfect information causes the expected social sanction to be lowest precisely when obedience is more common. This, amongst other findings, draws a distinct line between social and moral norms, both of which may depend on others’ behavior but not on action observability. The implications of the use of non-Bayesian belief formation rules by society, namely a representativeness rule (overweighting the signals) and conservativism (overweighting the prior), for payoff functions and equilibria are explored.     

Religious fragmentation,social identity and cooperation: Evidence from an artefactual field experiment in India

We study the role of village-level religious fragmentation on intra- and inter-group cooperation in India. We report on data on two-player prisoners׳ dilemma and stag hunt experiments played by 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of village-level religious heterogeneity. In religiously heterogeneous villages, cooperation rates in the prisoners׳ dilemma, and to a lesser extent the stag hunt game, are higher when subjects of either religion play with a fellow in-group member than when they play with an out-group member or with someone whose identity is unknown. Interestingly, cooperation rates among people of the same religion are significantly lower in homogeneous villages than in fragmented villages in both games.     

Contributions to Cournot oligopoly theory

This work contributes to a number of questions concerning oligopoly models. In particular, uniqueness of the Cournot equilibrium point is demonstrated under the assumption that either the unit price function is differentiable and the derivative is strictly negative or the cost functions are strictly convex. Also, under the assumption of either strictly decreasing unit price function or strictly convex cost functions, it is shown that (a) the total production level at equilibrium increases with entry of additional players, (b) that cooperation between some of the players necessarily entails profit for the others, and (c) cooperative grouping causes decrease in production levels.     

非自愿移民弱势群体安全保护网的设计

为弱势群体设置一道“安全网”是构建和谐社会的必然选择。本文通过对非自愿移民弱势群体的特征及范围的分析,针对非自愿移民弱势群体需要安全保护网络的建立与健全的迫切性,提出了依赖政府、社会、个人各方面的统筹规划,相互配合,设计全方位的移民弱势群体的安全保护网络。     

Domestic environmental policy and international cooperation for global commons

The paper analyzes the strategic behavior of several countries engaged in capital accumulation, pollution mitigation, and environmental adaptation in the context of an environmental common good. Both cooperative and non-cooperative strategies are discussed. The non-cooperative strategy is a dynamic game in which each country makes its own environmental decision following the open-loop Nash equilibrium. The cooperative social planner problem assumes an international environmental agreement in force. The non-cooperative and cooperative solutions are compared in the symmetric case of two countries and extended to several identical countries. It is shown that the non-cooperative strategy in multi-country world leads to over-production, over-consumption, over-pollution, and over-adaptation.     

SOCIAL NORMS,LOCAL INTERACTION,AND NEIGHBORHOOD PLANNING*

This article examines optimal social linkage when each individual's repeated interaction with each of his neighbors creates spillovers. Each individual's discount factor is randomly determined. A planner chooses a local interaction network or neighborhood design before the discount factors are realized. Each individual then plays a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game with his neighbors. A local trigger strategy equilibrium (LTSE) describes an equilibrium in which each individual conditions his cooperation on the cooperation of at least one “acceptable” group of neighbors. Our main results demonstrate a basic trade‐off in the design problem between suboptimal punishment and social conflict. Potentially suboptimal punishment arises in designs with local interactions since in this case monitoring is imperfect. Owing to the heterogeneity of discount factors, however, greater social conflict may arise in more connected networks. When individuals' discount factors are known to the planner, the optimal design exhibits a cooperative “core” and an uncooperative “fringe.”“Uncooperative” (impatient) types are connected to cooperative ones who tolerate their free riding so that social conflict is kept to a minimum. By contrast, when the planner knows only the ex ante distribution over individual discount factors, then in some cases the optimal design partitions individuals into maximally connected cliques (e.g., cul‐de‐sacs), whereas in other cases incomplete graphs with small overlap (e.g., grids) are possible.     

加快健全和完善社会保障制度

文章对加快健全和完善社会保障制度建设的必要性与重要性进行了分析，认为健全社会保障制度是推动经济增长，实现全面小康社会目标的必然选择，是维系社会稳定和国家长治久安的重要保证，也是实现人的全面发展的必要条件。     

Cooperation under alternative punishment institutions: An experiment

While peer punishment has been shown to increase group cooperation, there is open debate on how cooperative norms can emerge and on what motives drive individuals to punish. In a public good experiment we compared alternative punishment institutions and found (1) higher cooperation levels under a consensual punishment institution than under autonomous individual punishment; (2) similar cooperation levels under sequential and simultaneous punishment institutions.     

Agricultural innovation in less developed countries

We identify and elaborate some critical factors and mechanisms that foster the emergence of cooperative behavioral patterns. Through institutionalization, which solves social dilemmas through habituation, these factors and mechanisms provide the foundation of contingent cooperation and contextual trust in specific interaction ‘arenas’ and ‘meso’-sized ‘platforms’ (and related carrier groups) in these. This, then, may in turn support the emergence of general trust in the whole population, i.e., across all specific arenas and platforms. The emergence of institutions of cooperation may gain traction more easily in smaller arenas. This, and the transfer, spillover, or generalization to other arenas and platforms, is by no means determined, and the analytical foundation we offer permits to account for the different levels of cooperation, general trust, and socioeconomic performance observable in real-world economies (varieties of capitalisms). Directions of future research, as well as a policy focus, are provided as well.     

Gender differences in socially responsible consumption. An experimental investigation

We report on a simple experimental study designed to investigate the different gender attitudes towards socially responsible consumption. We use the Vote-with-the-Wallet Game, (VWG), a version of a repeated multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma that mimics the characteristics of the choice between a conventional and a socially responsible product. More precisely we test the effect of three factors: two different frames and an ex-post redistribution mechanism that transfers resources from purely self-interested consumers to responsible ones. We find that women remain significantly more cooperative (choosing more often the responsible good) when the redistribution mechanism is interrupted and are significantly less satisfied about the behaviour of the other players in that treatment.