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Abstract:
One of the greatest challenges in addressing global environmental and social problems is achieving cooperation, in which social and environmental processes are increasingly interlinked. Yet, most theoretical studies investigate cooperation within social dilemma settings, using normal form games with effectively only one environmental state. This paper extends the concept of a purely social to a coupled social–ecological dilemma by studying cooperation within stochastic games with multiple environmental states. The particular stochastic game we investigate enables us to study how time preferences influence long-term collective action under risk of collapse. We find that under certain conditions, caring for the future alone can transform this collective action challenge from a tragedy up to a comedy of the commons where cooperation dominates.
