Institutions, the rules of the game that shape repeated human interactions, clearly play a critical role in helping groups avoid the inefficient use of shared resources such as fisheries, freshwater, and the assimilative capacity of the environment. Institutions, however, are intimately intertwined with the human, social, and biophysical context within which they operate. Scholars typically are careful to take this context into account when studying institutions and Ostrom's Institutional Design Principles are a case in point. Scholars have tested whether Ostrom's Design Principles, which specify broad relationships between institutional arrangements and context, actually support successful governance of shared resources. This article further contributes to this line of research by leveraging the notion of institutional design to outline a research trajectory focused on coupled infrastructure systems in which institutions are seen as one class of infrastructure among many that dynamically interact to produce outcomes over time.

Research and interventions concerning anti-social behaviour have neglected the bad behaviour of “good” people or those who typically behave pro-socially. Additionally, past and current research and practice in this area have often neglected how factors in one’s current environment influence behaviour. Instead, the focus has been on how individual characteristics—borne of the interplay of genetic composition and environmental influences over time—result in anti-social behaviour. However, evidence suggests immediate contexts can foster even atypical behaviour, behavior not correlated with genetic and long-term environmental influences. The thesis is presented in four parts. Part One introduces the idea that immediate group context can have a significant effect on anti-social behaviour, particularly that of “good” people. Part Two reviews research on the impact of social dynamics on behaviour. Part Three presents the empirical study on the role of a particular group dynamic, social dilemmas, in relation to a specific type of anti-social behaviour, bullying. Finally, Part Four considers the implications of the thesis for future research and practice. Social dilemmas are situations in which individual motives are at odds with the best interests of the group and help to explain why individuals sometimes make anti-social decisions. The study at the core of this thesis tested two hypotheses: 1) both individual and group factors are associated with behaviour in bullying situations; and 2) attitudes, group norms, and social dilemmas each have a unique contribution to predicting behaviour in bullying situations. Participants were 292 middle school students at a residential school in the U.S., and data were analysed using multi-level modelling. The primary findings were, in general, consistent with the two hypotheses. The research suggests that social dilemma dynamics might be an important group factor in predicting behaviour in bullying situations.

abstract: As the world's resources face increasing pressure from a growing population, it is critical that psychologists understand the motivational processes that lead to cooperation or defection in the context of social dilemmas. Research has uncovered several key strategies for encouraging maintenance of these resources, however, one area that remains understudied is the effect various emotions may have on cooperation. Furthermore, it is important to consider the specific type of desired behavior: reduction of consumption of a shared resource, or increased contribution to a shared resource. The current study takes a step in this direction, examining the effects of two self-conscious emotions, guilt and pride, on behavior in two different kinds of social dilemmas. Guilt, a prosocial emotion that has been described as a "behavioral interrupt mechanism," is predicted to increase cooperation in both a social trap game and a public goods dilemma game. However, its effects should be strongest in the social trap game, in which the desired behavior is reduced consumption. Pride, an emotion that is conceptually related to the constructs of status and power, is predicted to motivate action in both domains, by increasing both consumption in the social trap game and contribution in the public goods dilemma game. Results partially support these predictions: Whereas guilt and pride both had the predicted effects on consumption in the social trap game, neither had a significant effect on contribution in the public goods dilemma game. Individual differences are examined, as are the results of a Game Feedback Sheet, which yielded insight as to how participants understood the rules of the games, and why they chose the strategies they did. Results support the idea that emotions represent a potentially fruitful avenue of research in social dilemma cooperation, and possible future directions for this research are discussed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Psychology 2012

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Psychology, 2006. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-47).

vii, 95 p. : ill. A print copy of this title is available through the UO Libraries under the call numbers: KNIGHT HB846.5 .C76 2000 / By traditional economic reasoning, the production and sale of private goods is assumed to be efficient in a pure market because only the owners of privately held goods can access and enjoy them. In contrast, public goods are likely to be under supplied, because individuals can free ride on the contributions of others. Citizens can solve the free rider problem either spontaneously or through the use of coercive tools such as taxation. However, such solutions will rarely be efficient. An alternative solution, seldom studied by political scientists, is the formation of clubs. Clubs exist to provide semi-public goods to their members. If only contributing members of a club can access its product (the club good), the club should be free of the free-rider problem. Because club goods are finite and rivalrous, clubs are subject to "crowding effects"; that is, per-member benefits will decline if clubs grow too large. Clubs can minimize this crowding by limiting the size of their membership. Clubs are traditionally formulated as consumer- driven arrangements, driven solely by the wealth-maximizing preferences of their memberships and not by external concerns. In an experimental setting, this dissertation demonstrates that clubs also tolerate crowding if club membership is the sole source of some club good for otherwise excluded individuals. Club members can minimize the effects of this crowding by making multilateral promises not to overuse the club good. This means that clubs members do consider the social ramifications of the club's membership policies, and those membership policies respond to government action (specifically, the presence of other funding for excluded individuals). This has implications for both the study of clubs and the associations that resemble them: firms, coalitions, and communities. / Committee in charge: Dr. John Orbell, Chair; Dr. Holly Arrow; Dr. Bill Harbaugh; Dr. Ron Mitchell

No description available.

The rapid evolution of portable devices and social media has enabled pervasive forms of distributed cooperation. A group could perform a task using a heterogeneous set of the devices (desktop, mobile), connections (wireless, wired, 3G) and software clients. We call this form of systems Distributed Dynamic Cooperative Environments (DDCEs). Content in DDCEs is created and shared by the users. The content could be static (e.g., video or audio), dynamic (e.g.,wikis), and/or Objects with behavior. Objects with behavior are programmed objects that take advantage of the available computational services (e.g., cloud-based services). Providing a desired Quality of Experience (QoE) in DDCEs is a challenge for cooperative systems designers. DDCEs are expected to provide groups with the utmost flexibility in conducting their cooperative activities. More flexibility at the user side means less control and predictability of the groups' behavior at the system side. Due to the lack of Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in DDCEs, groups may experience changes in the system behavior that are usually manifested as delays and inconsistencies in the shared state. We question the extent to which cooperation among group members is sensitive to system changes in DDCEs. We argue that a QoE definition for groups should account for cooperation emergence and sustainability. An experiment was conducted, where fifteen groups performed a loosely-coupled task that simulates social traps in a 3D virtual world. The groups were exposed to two forms of system delays. Exo-content delays are exogenous to the provided content (e.g., network delay). Endo-content delays are endogenous to the provided content (e.g., delay in processing time for Objects with behavior). Groups' performance in the experiment and their verbal communication have been recorded and analyzed. The results demonstrate the nonlinearity of groups' behavior when dealing with endo-content delays. System interventions are needed to maintain QoE even though that may increase the cost or the required resources. Systems are designed to be used rather than understood by users. When the system behavior changes, designers have two choices. The first is to expect the users to understand the system behavior and adjust their interaction accordingly. That did not happen in our experiment. Understanding the system behavior informed groups' behavior. It partially influenced how the groups succeeded or failed in accomplishing its goal. The second choice is to understand the semantics of the application and provide guarantees based on these semantics. Based on our results, we introduce the following design guidelines for QoE provision in DDCEs. • If possible the system should keep track of information about group goals and add guarding constraints to protect these goals. • QoE guarantees should be provided based on the semantics of the user-generated content that constitutes the group activity. • Users should be given the option to define the content that is sensitive to system changes (e.g., Objects with behavior that are sensitive to delays or require intensive computations) to avoid the negative impacts of endo-content delays. • Users should define the Objects with behavior that contribute to the shared state in order for the system to maintain the consistency of the shared state. • Endo-content delays were proven to have significantly negative impacts on the groups in our experiment compared to exo-content delays. We argue that system designers, if they have the choice, should trade processing time needed for Objects with behavior for exo-content delay. / Ph. D.

Made available in DSpace on 2010-04-20T20:50:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 62818.pdf.jpg: 12937 bytes, checksum: 1e36d7999a24205339f44fc2cb39b008 (MD5) 62818.pdf: 1990676 bytes, checksum: ad7e8efbf8383a6dc1396b30b90b64c7 (MD5) 62818.pdf.txt: 316727 bytes, checksum: d7cdc93a9b5934dbadff748293760a21 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-12-02T00:00:00Z / Across the years, study fields such as Political Sciences, Organizations and Economy have dedicated to the subject of the role of regulatory mechanisms on the decision behavior of agents. From different perspectives and approaches, each one of those fields have studied the impact of regulatory instruments on the decision of the players for a given action orientation. From the most frequently quoted instruments on the literature to regulate the action of the agents, we can point out formal and informal regulatory mechanisms. An intense debate over the studies dedicated to the subject has taken place, discussing the efficiency of each of those mechanisms on the player s decision. Given the relevance of such debate, the present study aims to compare the effectiveness of formal and informal regulatory mechanisms on one’s decision of cooperating to social dilemmas. Such dilemmas are situations on which a person, searching for one’s own interests, takes the group to worse results than those that would have been reached if there were cooperation among the group. To reach the goal of this study, we performed an experiment with undergraduate students from EAESP-FGV to test in an experimental environment the behavior of the agents under the pressure of two regulatory mechanisms. The results of this experiment showed that the informal regulatory mechanisms have a greater influence on the player s decision to cooperate and the presence of such mechanisms reduces the necessity of using a formal regulatory mechanism to ensure the cooperation from members of a group. / Ao longo dos anos, campos de estudos como os de ciência política, organizações e economia vêm se debruçando sobre a questão do papel de mecanismos regulativos no comportamento decisório do indivíduo. A partir de óticas e abordagens diferentes, cada um desses campos vem estudando o impacto de instrumentos de regulação na conformação dos atores para determinada orientação de ação. Dos instrumentos mais citados na literatura para regular a ação do ator, podemos apontar os mecanismos formais e informais de regulação. Um intenso debate entre os trabalhos dedicados ao assunto vem sendo travado, discutindo a eficiência de cada um deles na conformação do ator. Dada a relevância desse debate, o presente trabalho teve como objetivo comparar a efetividade de mecanismos formais e informais de regulação na decisão de cooperação do indivíduo em dilemas sociais, que são situações onde cada indivíduo ao buscar seu interesse próprio, leva a coletividade a resultados piores do que aqueles que seriam atingidos, caso houvesse cooperação do grupo. Para alcançarmos o objetivo do trabalho, realizou-se um experimento com alunos da graduação da EAESP-FGV para testar em ambiente laboratorial o comportamento dos agentes sob a pressão dos dois mecanismos de regulação. Os resultados do experimento mostraram que mecanismos informais de regulação têm maior influência na decisão de cooperação do ator, assim como sua presença diminui a necessidade do uso de um mecanismo formal de regulação para assegurar a cooperação dos membros de um grupo.

A question concerning not only modellers but also practitioners is: Under what circumstances can mutual cooperation be established and maintained by a group of people facing a common pool dilemma" A step before this question of institutional influences there is need for a different way of modelling human behaviour that does not draw on the rational actor paradigm, because this kind of modelling needs to be able to integrate various deviations from this theory shown in economic experiments. We have chosen a new approach based on observations in form of laboratory and field observations of actual human behaviour. We model human decision making as using an adaptive toolbox following the notion of Gigerenzer. Humans draw on a number of simple heuristics that are meaningful in a certain situation but may be useless in another. This is incorporated into our agent-based model by having agents perceive their environment, draw on a pool of heuristics to choose an appropriate one and use that heuristic.Behavioural differences can be incorporated in two ways. First, each agent has a number of attributes that differ in values, for example there are more and less cooperative agents. The second behavioural difference lies in the way, in which heuristics are chosen. With this modelling approach we contribute to a new way of modelling human behaviour, which is simple enough to be included into morecomplex models while at the same time realistic enough to cover actual decision making processes of humans. Modellers should be able to use this approach without a need to get deep into psychological, sociological or economic theory. Stakeholders in social dilemmas, who may be confronted with such a model should understand, why an agent decides in the way it does.

Le supply chain management fait l'objet d'une attention particulière de la part des entreprises et des chercheurs notamment en sciences de gestion. Il s'articule autour de la mutualisation de ressources et des compétences de chaque membre de la supply chain et la synergie qui subsiste entre eux afin de créer collectivement une valeur supérieure à la somme des valeurs créées séparément par chacun. Cette alliance, qui nécessite la coopération collective dans la création et le partage équitable de la valeur, est caractérisée par des comportements opportunistes qui entraînent des défaillances comme l'effet Bullwhip. Ainsi, notre objectif est d'analyser ces comportements afin de comprendre leur dynamique au sein de la supply chain. A cet égard, nous nous appuyons sur la perspective des dilemmes sociaux pour proposer deux mécanismes : un mécanisme motivationnel (partage de l'identité de la supply chain) et un mécanisme structurel (investissement dans les ressources relationnelles) pour à la fois réduire et décourager l'opportunisme. Afin d'appuyer notre raisonnement, ces mécanismes sont articulés pour créer un capital social qui, en facilitant le supply chain management, permet d'améliorer la performance de la supply chain. Cela a donné lieu à la conception d'un modèle intégrateur de la dynamique sociale de la supply chain. Celui-ci a été validé auprès d'un échantillon de 130 répondants (Responsables supply chain, directeurs logistiques, etc.). Les données collectées ont été analysées tout d'abord par une analyse univariée, suivie d'une analyse en composantes principales afin d'épurer nos échelle de mesure. En second lieu, nous avons fait appel aux modèles d'équations structurelles PLS-PM (régressions aux moindres carrées partiels), pour estimer d'une part, la validité convergente ainsi que la validité discriminante des échelles de mesures, et d'autre part, valider nos hypothèses de recherche relatives aux antécédents et aux conséquences du capital social de la supply chain. Les résultats d'analyse nous ont permis de valider toutes les hypothèses selon lesquelles les deux mécanismes de résolution du dilemme social permettent de développer un capital social au sein de la supply chain qui, en agissant comme un lubrificateur des relations inter-organisationnelle, permet d'améliorer la performance de la supply chain. / Supply chain management is subject of particular interest to professionals and researchers especially in management science. It revolves around the sharing of resources and expertise between supply chain members, and the synergy that exists between them to collectively create value that is more than the sum of the values created separately by each member. This alliance, which requires collective cooperation in the creation and the equitable sharing of the value, is characterized by opportunistic behaviors that lead to failure, as illustrated by the Bullwhip effect. Thus, our objective is to analyze these behaviors in an attempt to understand their dynamics within the supply chain. In this regard, we rely on the perspective of social dilemmas to propose two mechanisms: a motivational mechanism (sharing the identity of the supply chain) and a structural mechanism (investment in relational resources) to discourage and reduce opportunism. To support our reasoning, these mechanisms are articulated to create social capital, facilitating supply chain management, in turn improving supply chain performance. This leads to the design of an integrative model of supply chain social dynamics. This was validated with a sample of 130 respondents (supply chain heads, logistics managers, etc.). The collected data were analyzed first by univariate analysis followed by principal component analysis to refine our scale. Second, we used PLS-PM (partial least squares regression) structural equation models to estimate, on one hand, the convergent and the discriminant validity of the measurement scales validity, and on the other hand, validate our research hypotheses on the antecedents and the consequences of social capital in the supply chain. The results of these analyses have allowed us to validate all the assumptions that the two mechanisms for resolving social dilemma help develop social capital within the supply chain, and act to lubricate inter-organizational relations, allowing improved supply chain performance.