Cooperation

Cooperation

Social Media – Dr. Giorgos Cheliotis ([email protected])Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore

Introduction We examined several aspects of online social networks and online

communities in previous classes

But people do much more than ‘friending’ and chatting online; they contribute ideas, work and other resources to user-initiated projects, and cooperate with other users to get things done

e.g., organize an event, produce content or software that they and others can use, resolve disputes among users, etc.

This begs the question: why do online users contribute their work and time to common projects? Also… How do they coordinate action with other users? How do they balance private interest with working towards a common

goal that may sometimes conflict with individual rationality?

CNM Social Media Module – Giorgos Cheliotis ([email protected])2

Human cooperation

Several explanations have been developed: Cooperation is necessary for the organization of society and production, so it is

cultivated through socialization, education, experience, and/or force (i.e. can be dictated by hierarchies or cultural and community norms)

Private interest need not conflict with the pursuit of a common goal; when the two are mutually supportive, cooperation becomes the natural choice

Even when the two are not clearly linked, or in conflict, we may still derive pleasure (social-psychological rewards) from exhibiting altruistic, pro-social behavior, e.g., by helping those who may need our support

Education and the wide availability of information afforded by ICT’s can increase our empathy for others, leading to concern for the broader implications of our actions


The subject of cooperation is of course not unique to the online experience.Sociologists, economists, anthropologists, communications scholars and others have long sought to explain why and how cooperative behavior emerges.

The Internet as an ‘amplifier’ of human qualities


“Online social networks can be powerful amplifiers of collective action precisely because theyaugment and extend the power of ever-complexifying human sociality. To be sure, gossip,conflict, slander, fraud, greed and bigotry are part of human sociality, and those parts ofhuman behavior can be amplified, too. But altruism, fun, community and curiosity are alsoparts of human sociality−and I propose that the Web is an existence proof that thesecapabilities can be amplified, as well.”

Howard Rheingold*

•Source: http://freesouls.cc/essays/03-howard-rheingold-participative-pedagogy-for-a-literacy-of-literacies.html

The new affordances of ICT’s for cooperative behavior and the success of open source software, Wikipedia,

and numerous other online communities, have generated new interest in the nature of human

cooperation!

http://freesouls.cc/essays/03-howard-rheingold-participative-pedagogy-for-a-literacy-of-literacies.html�

Let’s take this one step at a time


why do we sometimes cooperate, while other times we do not?

Social dilemmas“Social dilemmas are situations in which individual rationality leads to collective irrationality. That is, individually responsible behavior leads to a situation where everyone is worse off than they might have been otherwise.”


Peter Kollock, 1998

The study of such ‘social dilemmas’ is relevant for online cooperation because:

a) It assumes that people are driven by individual rationality, i.e. the maximization of some personal reward, i.e. not making any assumptions on human nature other than the most simplistic one: that we try to do what is best for ourselves (and shows how this can lead to everyone being worse off)

b) This reductionist view on human nature is more suitable for examining cooperative behavior online, where one may cooperate with complete strangers, than it would be in the context of a family or tightly knit local community, where cooperation may be mandated by other factors

Strategies The study of social dilemmas revolves around individual strategies that have

outcomes that are relevant both to the individual and to others

An equilibrium is the final outcome after individuals have played out their strategies

A deficient equilibrium is said to occur when each individual’s rational decisions leave everyone worse off*


•Kollock, 1998

But this does not necessarily assume that people are shortsighted; they may be aware of the shortcomings but sometimes the best thing for an individual will simply not be the best for the group

A dominating strategy is one that yields the best outcome for the individual, irrespective of what everyone else does*

(so even if others may be willing to cooperate, your best option may still be to defect)

Prisoner’s Dilemma: Description


Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects from the other) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to a short jail sentence on a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives half the full sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation.*

What will they do?

* based on the description in the Wikipedia article on Prisoner’s Dilemma

Prisoner’s Dilemma: Formulation as Game


2

2

0

3

1

1

3

0

Cooperate (C)

Defect (D)

Cooperate (C) Defect (D)

PLAYER 1

PLAYER 2

DC> CC>DD>CD

Only one, deficient equilibrium:they both defect, receiving a much lower payoff as a group than they would have received had they cooperated

Defection is dominant strategy!

practical application: online commercial transactions with no collaterals

Two more games: Assurance and Chicken In the assurance game mutual cooperation (CC) yields a better outcome for each

player than unilateral defection (DC), i.e. CC>DC>DD>CD

If a player will do the same as what he/she thinks the other player will do (defection not dominant)

Two equilibria: CC (optimal) and DD (deficient)

In the chicken game mutual defection (DD) yields a worse outcome than unilateral cooperation (CD), i.e. DC>CC>CD>DD

Each player will do the opposite of what he/she thinks the other player will do (defection again not dominant)

Two equilibria: DC (optimal) and CD (deficient)


DDDD

C C

Each of these models of social dilemmas is a highly simplified representation of choices and their outcomes

But which one is more ‘realistic’, i.e. more representative of real life situations?


Think for example about your participation in teams, e.g. as a student: how would you choose whether to contribute to a team project or not?

Relevant considerations

Assume that the project will always succeed if everyone cooperates Can a subset of team members also complete the project, even

while some are defecting or does it require the cooperation of everyone?

What do you think others will do – cooperate or defect? What is the personal outcome if it fails? What if it fails because you defected (private cost, i.e. low grade and

social cost, i.e. discontent by peers and reputation loss)? What if it succeeds while you defected or fails while you

cooperated (because others defected)?


Imagine a two-person team


C/D C/D Success

Failure

C/D C/D

No

Yes

D

C C

D

C C or DSuccess

C/D

D C

FailureD

Assurance

Prisoner’s Dilemma, Assurance or Chicken

Expectation of other’s move

Your move

depends on how you value different outcomes

Type of gameRequires all contributors

With larger teams it becomes more complex and depends on shape of production function (how many contributors are needed)

Common multiple-person dilemmas

Social fence: each individual is faced with a cost that generates a benefit that can be shared by all

Example: public good provision (city parks, television, content freely available on social media platforms)

Relates to the production of a public good

Social trap: each individual can reap an immediate benefit, which produces a cost for all

Example: tragedy of the commons (pollution, overgrazing, free-riding on social media platforms)

Relates to the consumption of a public good


A social trap is the mirror image of a social fence: they both relate to public goods that are• non-excludable, i.e. everyone

can benefit from their use• non-rivalrous, i.e. my use

does not directly impact your use

• subtractable or depletable*, i.e. my use does impact the total available stock and with no replenishment can lead to depletion

* Sometimes in the literature depletable goods will be deemed rivalrous, because there is some rivalry involved, even if it is indirect and its consequences may only be felt after a long time (think about pollution, or overgrazing)

Aspects of multiple-person dilemmas

Anonymity (in large groups): one’s actions may not be revealed, directly or indirectly, to the rest of the group (i.e. one may not know with certainty whether someone else has defected) – opposite: identifiability

Diffusion of costs: the costs generated by social traps are diffused to everyone in the group, thus making them seem smaller; also any single contribution to the cost appears insignificant

Less control: with two persons, one can directly influence the other person’s decision and hence also the outcome; in larger groups there is less control and thus more uncertainty

Diffusion of responsibility: not knowing whether others will defect or cooperate (anonymity and less control) and given that one’s actions may incur only a very small amount of the total cost to the group, one does not feel so responsible for one’s actions and their outcome


Motivational solutions

Social value orientations (competitive, cooperative, altruistic, or individualistic) influence choices, but how to cultivate them unclear

Communication may help increase cooperative orientation (through information gathering, making commitments, and attempts at moral suasion)

Group identity also increases cooperation among people identifying with a particular group because of increased interest in well-being of group; but also inter-group competition


Strategic solutions (often require identifiability: individual actions observable)

Reciprocity: an iterative tit-for-tat strategy can transform a prisoner’s dilemma game into an assurance game (mutual cooperation or mutual defection) – but to lean more towards cooperation, must also forgive and give the benefit of a doubt

Group/Generalized Reciprocity: expectation that one’s actions will be reciprocated now or in the future, by some other member in the group increases cooperative or even altruistic behavior

Strategic Exit: an out-for-tat strategy that is cooperative until the first clear sign of defection, at which point, the ‘cheated’ party exits the relationship

Grim triggers: agreeing to cooperate only if everyone else does so as well. This leads to assurance game, but is risky because it can easily lead to mass defection

Social learning: inducing cooperative behavior through socialization and imitation of desirable behavior


Structural solutions (usually require identifiability; assume ability to change the game)

Increasing duration of relationships (stronger ties) and informationabout individuals’ actions

Altering payoff structure: making cooperation more attractive through rewards or defection less attractive through sanctions (tread carefully here, implementing sanctions can be costly and harsh sanctions may be counterproductive)

Increasing the efficacy of individual contributions: making each contribution matter more

Group size: traditional wisdom is that smaller is better, but CMC making larger groups more effective, plus they can reach more easily critical mass of contributors, so more tolerant to free-riding

Imposing restrictions on use: regulation by external authority, privatization, or collective management by group that uses the public good


How are online social dilemmas different?

Digital public goods are non-rivalrous and non-depletable The tragedy of the commons becomes almost irrelevant

The negative effects of free-riding are less pronounced

CMC, especially social media tools, make it much easier to communicate online Lower cost of coordination in larger groups

By tapping into large numbers of online users, online communities can reach critical mass even in the presence of free-riding

Low cost of contributing encourages cooperative behavior

The electronic traces of CMC make identifiability much easier and sanctions for defection (when/if necessary) less costly Cooperative action directly observable by entire community, encouraging social learning

and group reciprocity

Easier to reward cooperative behavior and promote top contributors

Easier to spot defection and even destructive behavior (e.g., vandalism) can be rectified quickly, protecting community and its work


Thoughts on Design


What are the most effective strategies that an online community can use to encourage cooperation and discourage defection or trolling/vandalism?

Which strategies would be less costly to enforce (both in terms of cost of implementation and social costs, e.g., creating undue discontent among users)?

How can one engage users of an online platform to jointly come up with ‘fair’ policies? (fairness being a relatively subjective and culturally contingent concept)

Think about online platforms you know and why some people make

contributions while others (perhaps also you) do not;

when would you be motivated to contribute?

To what extent should such strategies be embedded in the mechanics (software) of the platform and thus force users into acting according to community norms? Or should one rely more on the users to learn from each other? Wherein lies an optimal balance?

What about monetary incentives? The social dilemmas we examined, when formulated as games with different

payoffs, are rather abstract E.g., what does a payoff of “3” mean? Is that $3 or a number that is meant to capture

tangible and intangible (social-psychological) rewards?

The structural solution that involves altering the ‘payoff structure’ can be executed simply by providing monetary rewards for cooperation (where funds are available)

But there are some problems with publicly offering ‘prizes’ Common conceptions of fairness suggest that prizes should be awarded to

top-performing individuals or groups; this inevitably leads to both cooperation and competition

Money especially is known to alter the way people play out social dilemmas (turning them into calculated exchanges)

Divisibility and well-defined value of money also potential issue; in-kind rewards may be more acceptable to many communities, doing away with the issue of how much would be fair to allocate to different (potentially competing) individuals or teams


Is competition bad? It may appear from the previous discussions that competition is generally

undesirable and cooperation should always be the preferred route

This is not necessarily the case: promoting competition between members of an online community can be beneficial (top-raking member lists are a common way of doing this)

In fact, most real-world online platforms can be said to be driven by ‘coopetition’, i.e. a combination of cooperative and competitive behavior

Competition towards a monetary (or in-kind) prize more effective in motivating one-time contributions to a well-defined task

Understanding the norms and social value orientations of members of a community is essential before encouraging competition, especially when involving tangible rewards in the form of prizes

In practice, similarly to how corporate strategies are mostly aimed at avoiding competition where possible, online communities also try to avoid it because it can be damaging to their internal cohesion and limit the value that they can generate by themselves


The online organization of production

How does one organize the production of public goods in online communities?

What does this depend on? Is there a one-size-fits-all solution?


Assuming that an online platform has attracted a critical mass of contributors, who are willing to cooperate towards the production of a public good…

Open-source softwareSoftware that is freely available for use, study and reuse and usually written by teams of online volunteers

Some OSS projects have been extremely successful and rival commercial offerings in the marketplace Firefox for example is one of the most popular web

browsers, and it is was written for the most part by teams of volunteers

The Apache Web Server is used by many popular websites to serve web pages to visiting users

MySQL is a very popular software package for building and managing small or large databases

Drupal is a ‘content management system’ that is used by many popular websites to store, retrieve and present online their own and user-generated content

The success of OSS has led to many studies on the motivations of OSS contributors and their organization!


OSS motivations and organization The private-collective model (von Hippel): cooperators working on a collective project

reap significantly higher private rewards than free-riders (defectors who may use the product that cooperators produced, but were not involved in its production) Build the software according to their needs first

Learn more about the production process

Hone their skills

Learn about working in teams

Receive public recognition for their efforts

Contributors also reap other rewards from participating in OSS projects (what Yochai Benkler calls social-psychological rewards) that free-riders do not

Free revealing (von Hippel): contributors are often better off revealing their innovations rather than using them for themselves only; people are thus more willing to share than traditional theory on innovation would predict

Peer-production, i.e. the production of (virtually) anything by peers working outside of organizational hierarchies has proven more successful than expected by industrial organization theory, although some degree of self-organization is required for more complex projects (OSS open to new contributions, but not necessarily ‘democratic’)


Of course people produce a lot more than software on online platforms! How can we distinguish between different types of products and understand how to transfer lessons from OSS

into other domains?


Functional, cultural, and educational goods Functional goods perform a (series of) well-defined task(s) and are thus

engineered to perform these as well as possible, according to a set of requirements and a specification of how the requirements are to be satisfied; their value derives from their use in accomplishing tasksExample: softwarePublic good example: open-source software

Cultural goods are the products of individual expression and their value derives from their critical, aesthetic or entertainment qualitiesExample: music*Public good example: freely accessible online music

Educational goods are a special category that shares some of the characteristics of both cultural and functional goods, because they may not be as rigidly specified as functional goods often are, but do need to serve a very specific function that is culturally contingent but not as subjective as that of cultural goodsExample: a textbookPublic good example: a freely available online encyclopedia


* Interactive content, e.g., computer games, also includes functional components and thus transcends the distinction functional/cultural

Drivers of supply and demand

It is nearly impossible for anyone to possess all of the skills needed for the optimal production of a complex software product

For cultural goods, their diverse forms and wide breadth of skill sets required also guarantee that the distribution of skills in the population will be quite broad


Distribution of skills

Distribution of needs and tastes

Network effects

The production of functional goods is often driven by demand for functionality (needs), and the producers are also often ‘lead users’ with varying needs and hence driven to create their own software, which can also benefit others

For cultural goods, it’s the distribution of tastes in the population that perhaps matters more, and it is arguably wider than the distribution of needs

The more users use a piece of software, the more attractive it becomes for many other users with similar needs*, for very practical reasons (e.g., better support)

Are there network effects in cultural goods? There are , but skeptics argue that they are not as strong

* This is another form of preferential attachment

Transient utility


Source: Cheliotis, 2009

Functional goods exhibit a learning curve, but their use and value can extend over long periods of time before it starts to slope downwards

A user can make full use of a cultural good immediately, but its utility will decrease more quickly (actual decrease will depend on user preferences and medium/genre of content)

Organization


OSS projects usually centered around the maintenance and improvement of a project ‘trunk’, where all valuable contributions feed into; this helps ensure coordination and a functional product!

Forking is the initiation of a new, parallel trunk, often due to differences in opinion, and is not always welcome because it leads to duplication of effort


Ad-hoc and other models of organization


The maintenance of a project ‘trunk’ is not the only option, especially not in the diverse field of cultural production!

Diversity and the facilitation of serendipity take higher priority in cultural production


The role of licensing models

Collaborative projects need to decide under what terms and conditions the contributions of individuals are to be made available to the rest of the community and the world at large

Copyright law protects literary and artistic works, as well as software, granting authors exclusive rights to their creations

This exclusivity can hinder cooperation with others on collective, public projects, but it also empowers online communities to use copyright licenses to govern who can do what with the products they create

Due to the more diverse character of producers, content and users in cultural production, the licensing issue is more complex (at least in the sense that it is difficult to converge on one or two standard licenses that would be suitable for most projects)

Another important distinction is that cultural goods can usually be consumed as-is, whereas a lot of open-source software may need constant improvements and customizations to be truly useful in the long run, or to work with other software


Case study on online coordination: Wikipedia

User coordination via Talk pages essential part of Wikipedia community

Dispute resolution is only one aspect of coordination

Developing, interpreting and enforcing community policies is another

As communities grow larger, they spend an increasing amount of time and effort in coordination activities

As members become more senior, they take on more administrative tasks and exhibit greater sense of responsibility for entire community

However, this may not be true of all communities, it would also depend on their aims, products, and model of organization


Credits and licensing Front page photo by three letters above space (license: CC BY-NC-ND)

Floating network graphic by WebWizzard (license: CC BY)

Photo with two arrows by Julia Manzerova (license: CC BY-ND)

Prison cell photo by Still Burning (license: CC BY-NC)

34 CNM Social Media Module – Giorgos Cheliotis ([email protected])

Original content in this presentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Singapore Attribution 3.0 license unless stated otherwise (see above)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ozonic/41244584/�

http://www.flickr.com/photos/webwizzard/3931165508/�

http://www.flickr.com/photos/julia_manzerova/2757851927/�

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stillburning/46442359/�

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/sg/�

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/sg/�