Unintended Consequences of Some Solutions to Social Dilemmas

Abstract

Social dilemmas are known to involve “unintended consequences of social actions.” That is, individual members actions intended to improve their own benefits, when aggregated, produce consequences that are not desirable to any. What are often overlooked, in the disucssion of social dilemmas, are unintended consequences of some proposed solutions to social dilemmas. In particular, it is argued that (a) administration of selective incentives may reduce members “intrinsic motivation” to cooperate, and (b) strategic actions often initiate a vicious cycle of mutual punishment since strategic actions in social dilemmas always accompany “externality”. © 1989, Japanese Association For Mathematical Sociology. All rights reserved.