The Give-or-Take-Some Dilemma

The social dilemma paradigm traditionally addresses two types of collective action problems: give-some and take-some resource management dilemmas. We highlight several limitations of this paradigm in addressing more complicated resource management problems where actors both give and/or take resources simultaneously or sequentially. In this paper, we first extend the social dilemma paradigm by merging give-some and take-some dilemmas into the give-or-take-some (GOTS) dilemma. This extension internalizes several environmental elements of uncertainty that are assumed to be exogenously determined in the social dilemma paradigm. Second, we formalize the GOTS paradigm for one-shot and iterated situations. Lastly we discuss how the GOTS dilemma may be used to help address several complex and timely resource management problems.