The selfish vaccine Recipe: A simple mechanism for avoiding free-riding

Social loafing and free riding are common phenomena that may hinder crowdsourcing. The purpose of this work is to identify the minimum conditions that can promote cooperation and group problem solving avoiding free riding and social loafing. We assume two kinds of scenarios (Recipe A, free riders have access to benefits produced by groups and Recipe B, the benefit produced by groups are shared only within the group) and then we investigate the relationship among the tendency to cooperate, group sizes, and difficulty of the task by means of numerical simulations. Results indicate that in the Recipe A world, collective intelligence and crowdsourcing are generally less efficient compared to what observed in the Recipe B world. Indeed, in the latter cooperation appears to be the optimal strategy for the progress of the world. Given the social importance of crowdsourcing, we discuss some useful implications of our results on crowdsourcing projects.