Presidential Address: The Elementary Economics of Social Dilemmas

A social dilemma is, in essence, a prisoners' dilemma in a continuous strategy space. I discuss a number of social dilemmas that have caught my attention, offer an elementary, diagrammatic synthesis of them, and discuss some of the economic insights that the diagrams capture, including incentives for pre-commitment. Finally, I model pre-commitment via delegation and link results to the literature on the evolution of preferences.