Harsh environments: Multi-player cooperation with excludability and congestion

Abstract

The common-enemy hypothesis of by-product mutualism proposes that organisms are more likely to cooperate when facing the common enemy of a harsher environment. Micro-foundations of this hypothesis have so far focused on the case where cooperation consists of the production of a pure public good. In this case, the effect of a harsher environment is ambiguous: not only a common-enemy effect is possible, but also an opposite, competing effect where the harsher environment reduces the probability of cooperation. This paper shows that unambiguous effects of a harsher environment are predicted when considering the realistic case where the collective good produced is excludable (in the sense that whether or not a player benefits from the collective good depends on whether or not he is contributing) and/or congestible (in the sense that the benefits the individual player obtains from the collective good are affected by the number of contributing players). In particular, the competing effect is systematically predicted for club goods, where defectors are excluded from the benefits of the collective good. A common-enemy effect is instead systematically predicted for charity goods, where cooperators are excluded from the benefits of the collective good. These effects are maintained for congestible club goods and for congestible charity goods. As the degree to which a collective good is excludable can be meaningfully compared across different instances of cooperation, these contrasting predictions for public good, charity goods and club goods yield testable hypotheses for the common-enemy hypothesis of by-product mutualism.