Cooperative dispositions are conditional and degrade beyond a cost threshold.
Evidence
Besides that possibility, however, there are motives to cooperation that are not egoistic, but are more restricted than the kind of thing represented by the simplest psychological generalization of the preference schedule OR. There are general dispositions to cooperate which are conditional, and in particular are sensitive to costs: an agent will cooperate if it does not cost too much, but beyond this threshold he will not. The threshold may itself change over time. Moreover, failing perfect knowledge of the other agents’ dispositions, he may take a risk on a cooperative initiative if the cost of being deceived falls below a certain threshold. In these various … (R3) A disposition to cooperate is cost sensitive. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 137
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Cost sensitivity (R3) is exactly why Saramago’s blindness-induced scarcity collapses cooperation — rising costs push each agent past the threshold, productively feeding the reader’s Hardin thesis.
Related
- Cooperation can arise from cost-sensitive conditional dispositions, not just sanctions or altruism (similarity 0.91)
- Cooperation requires knowing others’ motives and being believed trustworthy (similarity 0.81)
- Cooperation depends on trust plus situation-specific constraints and incentives (similarity 0.81)
- Cooperation requires common knowledge of mutual preferences, not just shared preferences (similarity 0.80)
- Cooperation unravels without iterated mutual knowledge of cooperative intentions. (similarity 0.80)
- Real cooperation runs on mixed motivations that can undermine one another (similarity 0.80)
- Cooperation collapses if no one will knowingly take the dependent role. (similarity 0.79)
- Cooperative equilibria require conditional trust, not blind trust or blind distrust (similarity 0.79)
- Cooperation has no single solution; motivations combine and overdetermine action (similarity 0.78)