Many global challenges, such as climate change, resource depletion, and the spread of communicable diseases, are so-called collective action dilemmas. These are problems that can only be solved by large groups of people contributing to a common good and/or abstaining from harmful behavior. Collective action problems are often defined as situations where the gain for the collective is largest when everyone cooperates, while the gain for each individual actor is largest if he or she abstains from cooperating, disregarding all other actors’ behavior (Dawes, 1980). Nevertheless, it is well known that voluntary cooperation does frequently occur, especially in small- and medium-scale settings such as in the area of local resource extraction; scholars like Elinor Ostrom (Ostrom, 1990, 2005, 2011) and Arun Agrawal (Agrawal, 2001; Agrawal & Gibson, 1999; Agrawal & Goyal, 2001) have shown that such coop- eration occurs and have explained why. Thus, the literature has identi- fied a number of key factors that tend to increase the probability of cooperation, including smaller group size, the delimitation of the resource, low degree of anonymity, high degree of public disclosure, possibilities for communication among actors, repeated interactions, possibilities for punishing unwanted behavior, and – in particular – trust (Dietz, Dol? sak, Ostrom, & Stern, 2002). Factors that have been found to decrease cooperation include the availability of a resource being perceived to be critically low and uncertainty about the state of a resource (Hine and Gifford 1996; Parks, Xu, & Van Lange, 2017).
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