• Freedom of choice: Adding value to publi

    From ScienceDaily@1337:3/111 to All on Tue Jul 14 21:30:24 2020
    Freedom of choice: Adding value to public goods

    Date:
    July 14, 2020
    Source:
    Tokyo Institute of Technology
    Summary:
    An experimental game reveals that having the freedom to choose
    preferred public goods greatly increases their value by motivating
    more, and better, provisioning.



    FULL STORY ==========================================================================
    From climate and biodiversity to public health and law enforcement,
    public goods benefit all. They are produced or maintained through
    widespread participation in public-goods provision that is vulnerable
    to low participation rates. Avoiding this vulnerability has spurred a continuing search for better ways to promote participation.


    ==========================================================================
    Now, a study by an international group of researches shows that the
    ability to freely choose preferred public goods adds to their value by increasing participation rates. The findings offer surprising insights
    into human decision making, while also suggesting that societies may
    profit from bottom-up approaches to public-goods provision.

    Decades of experiments on human behavior and public goods games have consistently confirmed that initial participation rates hover around
    50%, but then decrease due to free riding (the act of piggybacking on
    the goodwill of others). Recent theoretical research suggests that
    social networks are instrumental in offsetting free riding but so
    far, large-scale experiments have failed to support these theoretical predictions.

    To investigate factors affecting public-goods provision, a research
    team coordinated by Marko Jusup from Tokyo Institute of Technology
    (Tokyo Tech) in Japan and Zhen Wang from Northwestern Polytechnical
    University in China conducted a social-dilemma experiment designed
    specifically to reveal what drives participation rates. Is it global characteristics of social networks or local circumstances of each
    individual? The team organized a game experiment played by 596 students
    who were equally distributed across three social-network configurations
    and two experimental conditions. Under control conditions, players could
    only decide whether to participate in public goods provision or not. A
    decision to participate implied contributing one unit of wealth to each
    public good within their reach. The total contribution would then be
    multiplied by an interest rate and divided equally not only between
    actual contributors, but also free riders who could have contributed,
    but chose not to. Free riders could thus piggyback on the effort of contributors to gain benefits without sharing costs. Players under
    treatment conditions could additionally decide how much to contribute
    to each of the public goods within their reach.

    A player with access to five different public goods would, by opting
    to participate under control conditions, contribute one unit of wealth
    to each of the public goods for a total contribution of five units. The
    same player under treatment conditions would also contribute a total of
    five units of wealth, but with a caveat that how much goes to each of
    the five public goods is subject to free will.

    The study found that local circumstances are more important than
    the global characteristics of social networks. Changing the network configuration does not appear to affect player decisions in any
    significant way, whereas letting players distribute their wealth freely increases participation in public goods provision, motivates better provisioning, and thus adds value to public goods.

    Remarkably, treatment conditions jump-started participation from the
    very beginning to form a cooperative milieu that is independent of social-network characteristics. Jusup comments: "This is surprising! We expected initial participation to be similar under both control and
    treatment conditions. Only later in the game did we expect gradual
    learning and optimization from players who could choose freely. We
    observed that increased participation in public- goods provision happens
    from the very first round of the game, as if the players could feel that
    extra freedoms weaken the underlying dilemma of whether to participate
    or not. Over time, more participation leads to more wealth, generating something akin to a free lunch for players under treatment conditions."
    The study identified three behavioral types that account for the results: prosocial, antisocial, and conditional cooperators. Prosocial players participate almost unconditionally, antisocial players mostly forgo participation, and conditional cooperators refuse participation when
    there are no other participators around. Notably, freedom of choice
    seems to foster conditional cooperation, as evidenced by the fact that conditional cooperators are mostly absent under control conditions but predominate under treatment conditions. This occurs because in the latter
    case, players receive much clearer signals from their surroundings,
    and can then better gauge the overall cooperativeness of their neighbors.

    There are many interesting implications for socio-economic settings.

    "Policymakers, for instance, could facilitate raising residential taxes
    by offering a portfolio of public goods for taxpayers to choose from,"
    write the researchers in their study published in Proceedings of the
    National Academy of Sciences.

    "And by doing so, voters could decouple long-term, life-improving,
    public-goods projects from the whims and fancies of political election
    cycles," adds Ivan Romić, a co-author of the study. "Going beyond
    the politics, private companies might be able to motivate customers
    to pay premium product prices if the premium could be directed toward
    a public good of customers' choosing, thus stepping up the corporate
    social responsibility while remaining profitable."

    ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Tokyo_Institute_of_Technology. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


    ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
    1. Lei Shi, Ivan Romić, Yongjuan Ma, Zhen Wang, Boris Podobnik, H.

    Eugene Stanley, Petter Holme, Marko Jusup. Freedom of choice adds
    value to public goods. Proceedings of the National Academy of
    Sciences, 2020; 201921806 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1921806117 ==========================================================================

    Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200714101138.htm

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