Evolutionary mechanisms that promote cooperation may not promote social welfare
This work addresses the design of evolutionary mechanisms for social goods, highlighting a potential trade-off that could impact policymakers and researchers in social sciences, though it is incremental in applying existing models to a new objective.
The study analyzed stochastic evolutionary models of peer and institutional incentives to show that maximizing cooperation levels can be detrimental to social welfare, defined as total population payoff including costs, and found that these objectives are often misaligned.
Understanding the emergence of prosocial behaviours among self-interested individuals is an important problem in many scientific disciplines. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain the evolution of such behaviours, primarily seeking the conditions under which a given mechanism can induce highest levels of cooperation. As these mechanisms usually involve costs that alter individual payoffs, it is however possible that aiming for highest levels of cooperation might be detrimental for social welfare -- the later broadly defined as the total population payoff, taking into account all costs involved for inducing increased prosocial behaviours. Herein, by comparatively analysing the social welfare and cooperation levels obtained from stochastic evolutionary models of two well-established mechanisms of prosocial behaviour, namely, peer and institutional incentives, we demonstrate exactly that. We show that the objectives of maximising cooperation levels and the objectives of maximising social welfare are often misaligned. We argue for the need of adopting social welfare as the main optimisation objective when designing and implementing evolutionary mechanisms for social and collective goods.