Guillaume Falmagne (Ecole Polytechnique 2024)

CORESO/COLNET: Cooperation in Large-scale NETworks

Environmental crises are more social than technical: human actions are often oriented towards individual benefit (associated to conflict/defection) rather than collective benefit (cooperation). Mechanisms favoring cooperation have been demonstrated, but on a small scale – yet the planetary crisis calls for global systemic cooperation.

The CORESO/COLNET project will investigate what structures of social interactions could help promote such cooperation. For example, tipping points can trigger rapid behavior change; and multi-layered networks can explore the interdependence between different scales or modes of interaction. To test these and other hypotheses already set forth, the project will develop a massively multiplayer online game dedicated to the issue of cooperation and aiming at thousands of players. This will allow to probe large-scale collective behaviors inaccessible to traditional laboratory experiments. The theoretical results will be disseminated via a local governance workshop and public policy recommendations