Department of Psychology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2011;6(8):e23019. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023019. Epub 2011 Aug 5.
Recent research has revived Long's "ecology of games" model to analyze how social actors cooperate in the context of multiple political and social games. However, there is still a paucity of theoretical work that considers the mechanisms by which large-scale cooperation can be promoted in a dynamic institutional landscape, in which actors can join new games and leave old ones. This paper develops an agent-based model of an ecology of games where agents participate in multiple public goods games. In addition to contribution decisions, the agents can leave and join different games, and these processes are de-coupled. We show that the payoff for cooperation is greater than for defection when limits to the number of actors per game ("capacity constraints") structure the population in ways that allow cooperators to cluster, independent of any complex individual-level mechanisms such as reputation or punishment. Our model suggests that capacity constraints are one effective mechanism for producing positive assortment and increasing cooperation in an ecology of games. The results suggest an important trade-off between the inclusiveness of policy processes and cooperation: Fully inclusive policy processes reduce the chances of cooperation.
近期的研究复兴了龙氏的“博弈生态学”模型，以分析社会行为者如何在多种政治和社会博弈的背景下进行合作。然而，仍缺乏理论工作来考虑在动态制度环境中促进大规模合作的机制，在这种环境中，行为者可以加入新的博弈并离开旧的博弈。本文开发了一个博弈生态学的基于主体的模型，其中主体参与多个公共物品博弈。除了贡献决策外，代理人还可以离开和加入不同的博弈，并且这些过程是解耦的。我们表明，当限制每个博弈中的参与者数量的“容量约束”以允许合作者聚类的方式来构建群体时，合作的收益大于背叛的收益，而与任何复杂的个体水平机制（如声誉或惩罚）无关。我们的模型表明，容量约束是在博弈生态学中产生积极分类和增加合作的一种有效机制。结果表明政策过程的包容性与合作之间存在重要的权衡：完全包容的政策过程会降低合作的机会。
