Collaboration as a pathway for sustainability

Abstract Conventional individualistic behaviours with their quest for profit maximization and wealth accumulation have created economic, environmental and social imbalances in today's world. These imbalances threaten to become worse in the coming years, decades and centuries. Calls and efforts towards sustainable development (SD) seek to establish a dynamic equilibrium among these elements. One of the key elements in the transition towards more sustainable societies is collaboration. This research presents three game theory tools to help rationalize that collaborative behaviours offer better results than individualistic ones. The first presented is the prisoners' dilemma. The second is the tragedy of the commons, a tool similar to the prisoners' dilemma but with more actors increasing the complexity. The third, the Nash equilibrium, offers a mathematical way to attempt to reach a system's optimum, i.e. to obtain the result that would in a totality benefit all the players. The tools are linked to SD problems. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.