| Summary: | Are groups of
people better able to minimize a collective loss if there is a collective
target that must be reached or if every small contribution helps? In this paper
we investigate whether cooperation in social dilemmas can be increased by
structuring the problem as a step-level social dilemma rather than a linear
social dilemma and whether cooperation can be increased by manipulating
endowment asymmetry between individuals. In two laboratory experiments using
‘Public Bad’ games, we found that that individuals defect less and are better
able to minimize collective and personal costs in a step-level social dilemma
than in a linear social dilemma. We found that the level of cooperation is not
affected by an ambiguous threshold: even when participants cannot be sure about
the optimal cooperation level, cooperation remains high in the step-level
social dilemmas. We find mixed results for the effect of asymmetry on
cooperation. These results imply that presenting social dilemmas as step-level
games and reducing asymmetry can help solve environmental dilemmas in the long
term.
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