Introduction to the Symposium on Research on Social Dilemmas

Abstract

In 2002 Elinor Ostrom and some of her colleagues organized a working group on Testing Theoretical Models of Individual Behavior in Dynamic Social Dilemmas and held the first meeting of this group at Indiana University Bloomington in 2003. There have now been five subsequent meetings of different incarnations of this group (2006, Max Planck Institute, Jena; 2008, Florida State University; 2010, Rice University; 2013, California Institute of Technology; 2015, Brown University) prior to the most recent one, the seventh in total, held in 2017 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. With each of these meetings, the size of the group and scope of the work presented has changed and shifted as new people become part of the group and as the research questions relevant to social dilemma researchers change over time. As a way of commemorating these events, the organizers have felt that it would be useful to create special issues or symposia in journals related to the meetings as a way of capturing a snapshot of the issues at the frontier of social dilemma research at each point in time. The 2013 meeting at Cal Tech was the first to take place after Ostrom's death in 2012, and it produced two such special issues, in part to memorialize her: one at the Journal of Theoretical Politics edited by Eric Coleman and Rick Wilson published in 2016, and one at Experiment Economics edited by Jimmy Walker and Mark Isaac published in 2015. In conjunction with the 2017 meetings at UMass Amherst, a call for papers went out for submissions to this current Symposium issue inviting submissions from people who have been affiliated with this group and to others working in the area so that we could present a compelling set of papers that encompass a broad range of the work aimed at helping us to better understand issues related to social dilemmas. The journal received a large number of submissions of very high‐quality work that was sent through the standard review process for the journal. In the end we are publishing eight of those submissions and are pleased with the quality and breadth of coverage these papers represent. We are also happy that while we received and will be publishing papers by authors with a direct association with these meetings, we also received many submissions by authors with no connection to the meetings and will be publishing several of these as well.

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