Fellow and alum research collaboration
Brick wall featuring a jagged crack tracing the observed pattern of cooperative decay
Governing Body Fellow Professor Felix Reed-Tsochas and Dr Nicholas Sabin (MSc Management Studies, 2008; DPhil Management 2009) have published new research in Nature uncovering why cooperation between people often unravels over time, even when groups have strong incentives to contribute to a common goal.
The collaboration between the pair initially started when Nick was working on his MSc dissertation under Felix’s mentorship, and then continued throughout Nick’s DPhil with Felix acting as his doctoral supervisor. Throughout, Nick was based both at Green Templeton and at the Saïd Business School. After a short post-doc in Oxford, Nick started a new position in 2017 as Associate Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Santiago de Chile.
Felix and Nick’s collaboration continued as they worked on a number of key publications after Nick’s move to Chile. To sustain the collaboration, Nick made regular visits to Oxford, and Felix spent part of a sabbatical year in Chile. This is also how Felix met the article’s third co-author, David Klinowski.
Neither geographical distance nor different time zones proved a barrier to making progress on the science. As Felix observes, ‘having been part of the same, tightly knit college community over many years provided an important foundation for the sustained and long-term collaboration that we have been able to build.’
Nick’s work with Felix included a five-year field study, conducted with a microfinance institution in Sierra Leone, as part of his DPhil. This involved tracking over 47,000 repayment transactions made by more than 7,000 borrowers operating under a joint liability lending system. In this structure, borrowers must cooperate each month to ensure that the group’s loan is fully repaid, or all members lose access to future credit.
Cooperation rates start out high but gradually decline due to decreases in group members’ cooperative motivation and effort. Sharp rebounds occur when loans are restarted and clients resensitised to their cooperative responsibilities, even though the group membership and dilemma structure are largely unchanged.
This pattern persists over the five-year observation window, but with each successive restart the subsequent decline is more rapid.
Although the research was conducted in a very specific setting, the authors believe that it captures fundamental aspects of human behaviour and may be relevant to many forms of everyday cooperation. Felix says that ‘In the long-term, sustained cooperation depends on keeping motivation alive.’
Read full news release about the article from the Saïd Business School
The article ‘Punctuated Decline of Human Cooperation’ by Nicholas Sabin, David Klinowski, and Felix Reed-Tsochas has been published in Nature online and will be included in a future print edition of the journal. Dr David Klinowski is an Assistant Professor of Economics at William & Mary.
Image description: The brick wall features a jagged crack tracing the observed pattern of cooperative decay found in the field study over five years. The photo of the brick wall was taken with a Canon EOS 7D and was edited using Gemini 3.1 Flash (Nano Banana 2) to add the principal crack following the empirical pattern of cooperation shown in Figure 1C of the main text.
Copyright: Photo by Nicholas Sabin, edited with Gemini (Nano Banana 2). © 2026 Nicholas Sabin / AI-enhanced.
