Emergence of social inequality in a spatial-ecological public goods game

Abstract

Spatial ecological public goods, such as forests, grasslands, and fish stocks risk being overexploited by selfish consumers, a phenomenon called \"the tragedy of commons\". The spatial and ecological dimensions introduce new features absent in non spatio-ecological contexts, such as consumer mobility, incomplete information availability, and rapid evolution by social learning. It is unclear how these different processes interact to influence the harvesting and dispersal strategies of consumers. To answer these questions, we develop and analyze an individual-based, spatially-structured evolutionary model with explicit resource dynamics. We find that, 1) When harvesting efficiency is low, consumers evolve a sedentary harvesting strategy, with which resources are harvested sustainably, but harvesting rates remain far below their maximum sustainable value. 2) As harvesting efficiency increases, consumers adopt a mobile consume-and-disperse strategy, which is sustainable, equitable, and allows for maximum sustainable yield. 3) Further increase in harvesting efficiency leads to large-scale overexploitation. 4) If costs of dispersal are significant, increased harvesting efficiency also leads to social inequality between frugal sedentary consumers and overexploitative mobile consumers. Whereas overexploitation can occur without social inequality, social inequality always leads to overexploitation. Thus, we identify four conditions, which are characteristic (and as such positive) features of modern societies resulting from technological progress, but also risk promoting social inequality and unsustainable resource use: high harvesting efficiency, moderately low costs of dispersal, high consumer density, and consumers tendency to rapidly adopt new strategies. We also show that access to global information, which is also a feature of modern societies, may help mitigate these risks.