Excessive abundance of common resources deters social responsibility

Abstract

We study the evolution of cooperation in the collective-risk social dilemma game, where the risk is determined by a collective target that must be reached with individual contributions. All players initially receive endowments from the available amount of common resources. While cooperators contribute part of their endowment to the collective target, defectors do not. If the target is not reached, the endowments of all players are lost. In our model, we introduce a feedback between the amount of common resources and the contributions of cooperators. We show that cooperation can be sustained only if the common resources are preserved but never excessively abound. This, however, requires a delicate balance between the amount of common resources that initially exist, and the amount cooperators contribute to the collective target. Exceeding critical thresholds in either of the two amounts leads to loss of cooperation, and consequently to the depletion of common resources.