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Freedom of choice adds value to public goods

Public goods, ranging from judiciary to sanitation to parkland, permeate daily life. They have been a subject of intense interdisciplinary study, with a traditional focus being on participation levels in isolated public goods games (PGGs) as opposed to a more recent focus on participation in PGGs em...

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Autores principales: Shi, Lei, Romić, Ivan, Ma, Yongjuan, Wang, Zhen, Podobnik, Boris, Stanley, H. Eugene, Holme, Petter, Jusup, Marko
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: National Academy of Sciences 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7395457/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32661169
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1921806117
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author Shi, Lei
Romić, Ivan
Ma, Yongjuan
Wang, Zhen
Podobnik, Boris
Stanley, H. Eugene
Holme, Petter
Jusup, Marko
author_facet Shi, Lei
Romić, Ivan
Ma, Yongjuan
Wang, Zhen
Podobnik, Boris
Stanley, H. Eugene
Holme, Petter
Jusup, Marko
author_sort Shi, Lei
collection PubMed
description Public goods, ranging from judiciary to sanitation to parkland, permeate daily life. They have been a subject of intense interdisciplinary study, with a traditional focus being on participation levels in isolated public goods games (PGGs) as opposed to a more recent focus on participation in PGGs embedded into complex social networks. We merged the two perspectives by arranging voluntary participants into one of three network configurations, upon which volunteers played a number of iterated PGGs within their network neighborhood. The purpose was to test whether the topology of social networks or a freedom to express preferences for some local public goods over others affect participation. The results show that changes in social networks are of little consequence, yet volunteers significantly increase participation when they freely express preferences. Surprisingly, the increase in participation happens from the very beginning of the game experiment, before any information about how others play can be gathered. Such information does get used later in the game as volunteers seek to correlate contributions with higher returns, thus adding significant value to public goods overall. These results are ascribable to a small number of behavioral phenotypes, and suggest that societies may be better off with bottom-up schemes for public goods provision.
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spelling pubmed-73954572020-08-07 Freedom of choice adds value to public goods Shi, Lei Romić, Ivan Ma, Yongjuan Wang, Zhen Podobnik, Boris Stanley, H. Eugene Holme, Petter Jusup, Marko Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Physical Sciences Public goods, ranging from judiciary to sanitation to parkland, permeate daily life. They have been a subject of intense interdisciplinary study, with a traditional focus being on participation levels in isolated public goods games (PGGs) as opposed to a more recent focus on participation in PGGs embedded into complex social networks. We merged the two perspectives by arranging voluntary participants into one of three network configurations, upon which volunteers played a number of iterated PGGs within their network neighborhood. The purpose was to test whether the topology of social networks or a freedom to express preferences for some local public goods over others affect participation. The results show that changes in social networks are of little consequence, yet volunteers significantly increase participation when they freely express preferences. Surprisingly, the increase in participation happens from the very beginning of the game experiment, before any information about how others play can be gathered. Such information does get used later in the game as volunteers seek to correlate contributions with higher returns, thus adding significant value to public goods overall. These results are ascribable to a small number of behavioral phenotypes, and suggest that societies may be better off with bottom-up schemes for public goods provision. National Academy of Sciences 2020-07-28 2020-07-13 /pmc/articles/PMC7395457/ /pubmed/32661169 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1921806117 Text en Copyright © 2020 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Physical Sciences
Shi, Lei
Romić, Ivan
Ma, Yongjuan
Wang, Zhen
Podobnik, Boris
Stanley, H. Eugene
Holme, Petter
Jusup, Marko
Freedom of choice adds value to public goods
title Freedom of choice adds value to public goods
title_full Freedom of choice adds value to public goods
title_fullStr Freedom of choice adds value to public goods
title_full_unstemmed Freedom of choice adds value to public goods
title_short Freedom of choice adds value to public goods
title_sort freedom of choice adds value to public goods
topic Physical Sciences
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7395457/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32661169
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1921806117
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