Volunteer’s Dilemma. A Social Trap without a Dominant Strategy and some Empirical Results

Abstract

Conflicts between individual and collective interests are usually discussed in a prisoner’s dilemma context. Panic situations, the armaments race of the superpowers, exploitation of resources (“tragedy of the commons”), Hobbe’s problem of cooperation in anarchic societies and the evolution of cooperation (Axelrod, 1984), as well as numerous other examples of “social traps” (Platt, 1973) were described in the game theoretical language of prisoner’s dilemma. Increasing interest in N-person-prisoner’s dilemma (N-PD) stems also from the fact that there is a structural equality between Olson’s (1965) “Logic of Collective Action” and N-PD as was shown by Hardin (1971). The generalized PD-game seems to serve as a paradigm for social dilemmas, where interdependent individual actions cause paradoxical results. Dawes (1975) defines social dilemmas by two characteristics: the existence of a dominant strategy and the Pareto-inferior intersection of dominant strategies. Both characteristics in a broad sense also define generalized PD-games. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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