Coalition-structured governance improves cooperation to provide public goods

While the benefits of common and public goods are shared, they tend to be scarce when contributions are provided voluntarily. Failure to cooperate in the provision or preservation of these goods is fundamental to sustainability challenges, ranging from local fisheries to global climate change. In the real world, such cooperative dilemmas occur in multiple interactions with complex strategic interests and frequently without full information. We argue that voluntary cooperation enabled across overlapping coalitions (akin to polycentricity) not only facilitates a higher generation of non-excludable public goods, but it may also allow evolution toward a more cooperative, stable, and inclusive approach to governance. Contrary to any previous study, we show that these merits of multi-coalition governance are far more general than the singular examples occurring in the literature, and they are robust under diverse conditions of excludability, congestion of the non-excludable public good, and arbitrary shapes of the return-to-contribution function. We first confirm the intuition that a single coalition without enforcement and with players pursuing their self-interest without knowledge of returns to contribution is prone to cooperative failure. Next, we demonstrate that the same pessimistic model but with a multi-coalition structure of governance experiences relatively higher cooperation by enabling recognition of marginal gains of cooperation in the game at stake. In the absence of enforcement, public-goods regimes that evolve through a proliferation of voluntary cooperative forums can maintain and increase cooperation more successfully than singular, inclusive regimes.Supported by US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (D17AC00005), National Science Foundation grant GEO-1211972, and Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia (FCT) through grants PTDC/MAT/STA/3358/2014, PTDC/EEI-SII/5081/2014, and UID/BIA/04050/2013. P.M.H. was supported by the Walbridge Fund at the Princeton Environmental Institute

Cleave and capture chemistry illustrated through bimetallic-induced fragmentation of tetrahydrofuran

The cleavage of ethers is commonly encountered in organometallic chemistry though rarely studied in the context of newly emerging bimetallic reagents. Recently it was reported that a bimetallic sodium-zinc base can deprotonate cyclic tetrahydrofuran (THF) under mild conditions without opening its heterocyclic (OC4) ring. In marked contrast to this synergic sedation, herein we show that switching to more reactive sodium-magnesium or sodium-manganese bases promotes cleavage of at least six bonds in THF, but the ring fragments are uniquely captured in separate crystalline complexes. Oxide fragments occupy guest positions in bimetallic inverse crown ethers and C4 fragments ultimately appear in bimetallated butadiene molecules. These results demonstrate the special synergic reactivity that can be executed by bimetallic reagents, including the ability to capture and control and thereby study reactive fragments from sensitive substrates