Free riding experiments have generated many anomalous results that cannot be explained with standard Nash equilibrium models of public goods. This paper examines the experiments within the context of evolutionary game theory. This approach models the decision process of agents by an adaptive learning algorithm. The algorithm ‘strengthens’ strategies that do relatively well and ‘weakens’ strateg...

We run a public good experiment in the field and in the lab with (partly) the same subjects. The field experiment is a true natural field experiment as subjects do not know that they are exposed to an experimental variation. We can show that subjects’ behavior in the classic lab public good experiment correlates with their behavior in the structurally comparable public good treatment in the fie...

Individual decision-making regarding vaccination may be affected by the vaccination choices of others. As vaccination produces externalities reducing transmission of a disease, it can provide an incentive for individuals to be free-riders who benefit from the vaccination of others while avoiding the cost of vaccination. This study examined an individual's decision about vaccination in a group s...

High immunization coverage rates are desirable in order to reduce total morbidity and mortality rates, but it may also provide an incentive for herd immunity free riding strategies. The aim of this paper was to investigate the link between cognitive ability and vaccination intention in a hypothetical scenario experiment about Avian Flu immunization. A between-subject scenario experiment was uti...

Background In social networks, trust is a complex social network. Participants in online social networks want to share information and experiences with as many reliable users as possible. However, the modeling of trust is complicated and application dependent. Modeling trust needs to consider interaction history, recommendation, user behaviors and so on. Therefore, modeling trust is an importan...

Most of the existing research in peer-to-peer systems focuses on protocol design and doesn’t consider the rationality of each peer. One phenomenon that should not be ignored is free riding. Some peers simply consume system resources but contribute nothing to the system. In this paper we present an agentbased peer-to-peer system, in which each peer is a software agent and the agents cooperate to...

A model is developed to study how the code architecture affects open source software (OSS) development. The model incorporates the resource heterogeneity and diverse motivations of various groups of programmers as well as the strategic interactions among them. We argue that the major advantage brought by a modular architecture of OSS code base is that it reduces both the cognitive cost and the ...

This paper reviews the growth behavior of a popular peer-to-peer network. We propose a dynamic hypothesis that the growth, overshoot, and collapse trajectories may be the result of complex causal interactions between inadequate resources, private provision of common goods, free riding, and membership dynamics. We draw parallels with other systems that are well-understood and known to exhibit si...

As club goods, religions face the problem of free riding. Smaller religious clubs, such as cults or sects, can often surmount this problem through communal pressures or by requiring their members to provide easily monitored signals. Generally, however, such tactics will be unavailable or too costly for large denominations, and, as such, these denominations must look for other techniques to avoi...

Many economic decisions are susceptible to either free-riding, or excessive rivalry or overextraction. Equally sharing output in partnerships introduces a free-riding incentive which may offset the latter. We conduct a laboratory experiment to assess the performance of output sharing in partnerships by introducing equal-sharing subgroups of size one, four and six into a twelve-person common poo...