A sequential collective action game and its applications to cooperative parental care in a songbird

Collective action problems arise when two or more individuals can free ride on one another's efforts when investing jointly in a common good. Many collective action tasks in nature, such as parental care, require multiple stages of investments to complete a task, but how the costs of consecutive periods of investment and the excludability and diminishability of a collective good influence investment strategy remains poorly understood. Here, we...