Cooperation and Endogenous Repetition in an Infinitely Repeated Social Dilemma

No 2017_08, Department of Economics Working Papers from Durham University, Department of Economics

Abstract: A large body of theoretical and experimental literature suggests that exogenously imposed infinite repetition can mitigate people’s opportunistic behavior in dilemma situations through personal enforcement. But, do people collectively choose to interact with the same persons, when there is an alternative with random matching? In a framework of an indefinitely-repeated collective action dilemma game, we let subjects collectively choose whether to (i) play with specific others for all rounds or to (ii) play with randomly matched counterparts in every period. The experiment showed that most subjects collectively select the partner matching option. It also indicated that groups achieve a higher level of cooperation when subjects collectively select option (i) by voting, compared with when the same option is exogenously imposed. These findings have an implication that people’s equilibrium selection may be affected by how the basic rules of games are introduced (endogenously or exogenously) to them.

Keywords: experiment; public goods; cooperation; dilemma; social norms; endogenous choices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 C92 D72 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/business/working-papers/EconWP17_08.pdf main text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Cooperation and endogenous repetition in an infinitely repeated social dilemma (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dur:durham:2017_08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from Durham University, Department of Economics Durham University Business School, Mill Hill Lane, Durham DH1 3LB, England. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tatiana Damjanovic ().