Precommitment in Stochastic Versus Deterministic Social Dilemmas

ABSTRACT Many real‐world social dilemmas require interdependent people to repeatedly protect against a large loss that has a low probability of occurring. Examples include protecting against disease outbreak (e.g., COVID‐19), terrorism (shared border security), or extreme weather events (from climate change). Decisions on whether to invest in protection may be made period by period (e.g., month by month), or investment may be precommitted in advance for a number of periods. How does precommitment influence cooperation in these situations? A series of four studies (plus one supplemental study) investigates this question, using incentive‐compatible, repeated social dilemmas with large‐magnitude, low‐probability losses. These studies found that in stochastic social dilemmas, binding precommitment increases cooperation, but nonbinding precommitment has little effect, and in deterministic social dilemmas, binding precommitment decreases cooperation. These patterns were driven by changes in responsiveness to probabilities and interactions with counterparts, with implications for how to structure real‐world dilemmas to increase cooperative investment in protection.