Social dilemmas are situations in which individuals, groups or nations face a choice between their own short-term interests and the longer-term interests of all parties involved, including themselves. As a consequence, in the end they all regret the way they have acted. Examples of social dilemmas are easy to find: depletion of vital resources, arms races, over-production of hazardous substances and environmental pollutants, information hoarding, and the failure to provide and maintain public goods. Understanding the dynamics of social dilemmas constitutes a major challenge. One prominent feature that distinguishes this book is the focus on computer simulations as a methodology for the exploration of the dynamic interplay of individual level processes and aggregate outcomes.

Social Dilemmas: Individual, Collective, and Dynamic Perspectives.- Social Dilemmas: Individual, Collective, and Dynamic Perspectives..- 1 The Collective Perspective; Provision of Resources.- Collective Risk Generation and Risk Management: The Unexploited Potential of the Social Dilemmas Paradigm..- Attitudes toward Public Affairs in a Society in Transition..- Provision of Community Social Services: The Role of Distributive Fairness for Willingness to Pay..- Concentration and Dispersion of Resources in Simulated Organizations Characterized by Equal or Unequal Power Relations..- 2 The Individual Perspective; Cooperation in Experimental Games.- Why do 'Cooperators' Cooperate?: Efficacy as a Moderator of Social Motive Effects..- Tacit Coordination and Fairness Judgments in Social Dilemmas..- Does Knowing the Jointly Rational Solution Make You Want to Pursue it? Motivational Orientation, Information, and Behavior in two Social Dilemmas..- Reduction of Environmental Risk as a Public Good..- Hostage Posting as a Mechanism for Co-operation in the Prisoner'sDilemma Game..- The Effect of Threshold Level on Greed, Fear, and Cooperation in Step-level, Give-some and Take-some Dilemmas..- Does "The Motivating Power of Loss" Exist? An Experimental Test of the Effect of Losses on Cooperation..- 3 The Dynamic Perspective; Computer Simulations of Micro-macro Dynamics.- Computer Simulation of Cooperative Decision Making..- Natural Selection and Social Learning in Prisoner'sDilemma: Co-adaptation with Genetic Algorithms and Artificial Neural Networks..- Foundations of Rational Interaction in Cognitive Agents: a Computational Approach..- Computer Simulation of Social Value Orientation: Vitality, Satisfaction, and Emergent Game Structures..- The Generalized Exchange Perspective on the Evolution of Altruism..- Social Dilemmas in Lineland and Flatland..- Selective Play: Social Embeddedness of Social Dilemmas..- 'self-organizing' Friendship Networks..- The Evolution of Cooperation in a Simulated Inter-group Conflict.