Freedom to choose between public resources promotes cooperation

Abstract

As cooperation incurs a cost to the cooperator for others to benefit, its evolution seems to contradict natural selection. How evolution has resolved this obstacle has been among the most intensely studied questions in evolutionary theory in recent decades. Here, we show that having a choice between different public resources provides a simple mechanism for cooperation to flourish. Such a mechanism can be at work in many biological or social contexts where individuals can form different groups or join different institutions to perform a collective action task, or when they can choose between collective actions with different profitability. As a simple evolutionary model suggests, defectors tend to join the highest quality resource in such a context. This allows cooperators to survive and out-compete defectors by sheltering in a lower quality resource. Cooperation is maximized, however, when the qualities of the two highest quality resources are similar, and thus, they are almost interchangeable.