Collaboration Conundrum: Synchrony-Cooperation Trade-off

Abstract

In large groups, every collaborative act requires balancing two pressures: the need to achieve behavioural synchrony and the need to keep free riding to a minimum. This paper introduces a model of collaboration that requires both synchronisation on a social network and costly cooperation. The results show that coordination slows, and cooperativeness increases with the social network`s local integratedness, measured by the clustering coefficient. That is, in a large-group collaboration, achieving behavioural synchrony and strategic cooperation are in opposition to each other. The optimal clustering coefficient has no natural state in our species, and is determined by the ecological environment, the group`s technology set, and the group`s size. This opens the space for social technologies that solve this optimisation problem by generating optimal social network structures.