Human cooperation in changing groups in a large-scale public goods game.

ABSTRACT: How people cooperate to provide public goods is an important scientific question and relates to many societal problems. Previous research studied how people cooperate in stable groups in repeated or one-time-only encounters. However, most real-world public good problems occur in groups with a gradually changing composition due to old members leaving and new members arriving. How group changes are related to cooperation in public good provision is not well understood. To address this issue, we analyze a dataset from an online public goods game comprising approximately 1.5 million contribution decisions made by about 135 thousand players in about 11.3 thousand groups with about 234 thousand changes in group composition. We find that changes in group composition negatively relate to cooperati

SUBMITTER: Otten K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9613774 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature