Three potential social dilemmas

As we have seen, social dilemmas can be analysed from two distinct points of view: the observer's perspective and the actor's perspective. The observer's perspective is the point of view most commonly taken in analyses of social dilemmas. Characteristically, this perspective attributes Prisoner's Dilemma preference orderings over outcomes to players. As a consequence, every Potential Contributor's Dilemma is regarded as an actual Contributor's Dilemma. In contrast, the actor's perspective aims at recovering the players’ preferences over outcomes. According to this perspective, the researcher should limit his role to observing the actor's own assessment of a Potential Contributor's Dilemma. The central questions to be answered by empirical research are the following: how do Potential Contributor's Dilemmas play out? When do they transform into actual dilemmas with the suboptimal outcome of mutual defection? And under what conditions are actual dilemmas avoided?

To start answering these questions, the present chapter provides a design for survey research, in which the preferences of a large sample of respondents over the outcomes of Potential Contributor's Dilemmas are measured. In our survey, we recorded the orderings reported in three different Potential Contributor's Dilemmas. Based on the actor's perspective, we will attempt to explain the variety of preference orderings within each of the three environmental problems of collective action in the course of the book. Furthermore, as noted in chapter 3, the actor's perspective also enables us to address the non-equivalence of social dilemmas.