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Summary: Cooperation as a volunteer's dilemma and the strategy
of conflict in public goods games
M. ARCHETTI
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Introduction
Social dilemmas
Social dilemmas are situations in which the optimal
decision of an individual contrasts with the optimal
decision for the group. In game theory, this usually means
games in which a dominant strategy leads to a Pareto
inefficient equilibrium (Hardin, 1968; Dawes, 1980); the
prisoner's dilemma (PD) (Tucker, 1950; Luce & Raiffa,
1957) is probably the most famous example. Solutions to
these social dilemmas require repeated interactions,
which allow reciprocation, punishment and reputation
effects (Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981; Nowak, 2006). Situ-
ations of conflict for the exploitation of common resources
(public goods games) are usually modelled as an N-person
version of the PD. Individuals can be cooperators or
defectors; cooperators pay a cost for contributing to the
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