Data from: Reciprocity and the tragedies of maintaining and providing the commons

Social cooperation often requires collectively beneficial but individually
costly restraint to maintain a public good, or it needs costly generosity
to create one. Status quo effects predict that maintaining a public good
is easier than providing a new one. Here, we show experimentally and with
simulations that even under identical incentives, low levels of
cooperation (the ‘tragedy of the commons’) are systematically more likely
in maintenance than provision. Across three series of experiments, we find
that strong and weak positive reciprocity, known to be fundamental
tendencies underpinning human cooperation, are substantially diminished
under maintenance compared with provision. As we show in a fourth
experiment, the opposite holds for negative reciprocity (‘punishment’).
Our findings suggest that incentives to avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’
need to contend with dilemma-specific reciprocity.