Human cooperation for the sustainable management of public goods under institutional punishment and corruption

Human society faces significant challenges in managing public goods and common resources such as soil, water, energy, and urban spaces. These are underscored by the Horizon Europe Missions, which emphasise sustainable development, environmental protection, and social cohesion. The effective management of collective resources is particularly challenging due to the tension between optimizing collective outcomes and individual incentives. Achieving optimal collective outcomes requires persistent and effortful engagement from participants, whereas individuals often have incentives to avoid such effort. Promoting cooperative interactions and behaviours among members of society is then the key to achieving sustainable public good creation and management. One of the most successful approaches to addressing these problems is their framing as social dilemmas, especially the public goods and common resource games [11,15,16]. There, the conflict between public goods and private incentives leads to the so-called tragedy of the commons, involving the depletion of common resources and inefficient provision of public goods [12,13]. While many mechanisms to enable cooperation have been studied in the literature, including reputation, direct and indirect reciprocity, incentives, and punishments [14], several others are known to disrupt the ability of a group to effectively manage common resources: misinformation, deceptive communication, weak institutions, and corruption [5]. Finally, some mechanisms produce less clear-cut effects on cooperation, such as the possibility of an individual to opt-out (or migrating) to avoid an unwanted interaction [2]. The overarching goal of this proposal is to advance the understanding of these mechanisms (exit and corruption) in a context characterized by weak institutions with limited ability to punish individuals. To this end, we will formulate novel variations of public goods or common resource games that more closely mirror real-world social situations, suitable for the study of corruption and/or exit strategies. We will then assess the impact of the aforementioned mechanisms on cooperation in these social dilemmas through behavioural economics experiments and computational models involving cognitively-rich agents capable of learning novel strategies (i.e. via multi-agent reinforcement learning). The computational models will inform the definitions of the precise setups and behavioural patterns to be investigated through experiments. The latter, in turn, will be used to improve the behavioural modelling of computational agents. In conclusion, this project represents a comprehensive approach to understanding and addressing the challenges of managing public goods and common resources, contributing to the EU's mission of promoting sustainable development for the benefit of all by helping policymakers decide which factors to consider when attempting to incentivise sustainable cooperation.