Scaling up commons dilemma experiments for research and education

Many of the challenges facing contemporary society are collective action problems involving shared resources (known as “commons”).

Examples include emission reductions to reduce risks of climate change, and mask-wearing to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

In collective action, there is often tension or conflict between the goals of the community and the goals of the individual.

Wearing masks and hand washing during the COVID-19 crisis reduces the spread of the virus and flattens the curve, although it might be an inconvenience for the individual. This project investigates three fundamental puzzles in this research area. First, what makes communication so effective at stimulating cooperative outcomes?

It is known that communication, even if participants have no ability to enforce promises, has a major positive effect. The goal of the project is to understand what aspects of communication content explains successful cooperation. Second, how does a group’s size impact the ability of its members to cooperate?

With smaller groups, it is easier to identify who is free riding. However, small groups may not have sufficient person power to monitor resource appropriation. Third, how do groups that address collective action problems cope with uncertainty and surprises.

Various events in 2020, such as the pandemic, are testament to the importance of understanding collective action under uncertainty.

Researchers have investigated risk and collective action, with known probabilities of events, but there is a gap in the understanding of how groups cope with unknown unknowns. To address these puzzles, there is a need to scale up controlled behavioral experiments. This project builds a robust platform for “commons” research that also serves as an engaging educational game.

The project is mentoring many graduate and undergraduate students, with diverse backgrounds, in research design, data collection, analyses, and programming.

Project outcomes include educational resources for college level courses, as well as a special K12 version of the game with accompanying educational material for teachers.<br/><br/>The transdisciplinary research team expands a web-based experiment, the Port of Mars, where a group of players make decisions to invest in shared infrastructure and perform actions that benefit themselves and have consequences for the group.

The platform enables the conducting of large-scale controlled experiments with in-game chat communication and random events that introduce uncertainty and variance into each play-through.

A large number of participants (both college students and members of the general population) take part in a tournament, coined “Mars Madness”, where they compete to become the champion of Port of Mars. Six experimental designs test hypotheses on communication, group size and uncertainty.

Data collected during the tournaments is used to train machine-learning models that classify communication data into functional categories which help to better understand how communication among players relate to group performance.

In the various tournaments group sizes vary between five and fifty players and they make possible to evaluate the impacts of uncertainty on collective action by controlling players’ knowledge of events and adjusting the thresholds that trigger events.

Furthermore, the studies show the extent to which participating in the behavioral experiments improve the understanding of collective action problems.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.