Reciprocity and the tragedies of maintaining and providing the commons

Social cooperation often requires collectively beneficial but individually costly restraint to maintain a public good 1–4 , or it needs costly generosity to create one 1,5 . Status quo effects 6 predict that maintaining a public good is easier than providing a new one. Here, we show experimentally and with simulations that even under identical incentives, low levels of cooperation (the ‘tragedy of the commons’ 2 ) are systematically more likely in maintenance than provision. Across three series of experiments, we find that strong and weak positive reciprocity, known to be fundamental tendencies underpinning human cooperation 7–10 , are substantially diminished under maintenance compared with provision. As we show in a fourth experiment, the opposite holds for negative reciprocity (‘punishment’). Our findings suggest that incentives to avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’ need to contend with dilemma-specific reciprocity. Gächter et al. use experiments and simulations to show that low levels of cooperation (the ‘tragedy of the commons’) are systematically more likely in maintaining a public good than in providing a new one, even under identical incentives.