Observations on Cooperation

Yuval Heller and Erik Mohlin ()

No 2017-12, Working Papers from Bar-Ilan University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study environments in which agents are randomly matched to play a Prisoner’s Dilemma, and each player observes a few of the partner’s past actions against previous opponents. We depart from the existing related literature by allowing a small fraction of the population to be commitment types. The presence of committed agents destabilizes previously proposed mechanisms for sustaining cooperation. We present a novel intuitive combination of strategies that sustains cooperation in various environments. Moreover, we show that under an additional assumption of stationarity, this combination of strategies is essentially the unique mechanism to support full cooperation, and it is robust to various perturbations. Finally, we extend the results to a setup in which agents also observe actions played by past opponents against the current partner, and we characterize which observation structure is optimal for sustaining cooperation.

Keywords: Community enforcement; indirect reciprocity; random matching; Prisoner’s Dilemma; image scoring. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2017-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-hpe and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ.biu.ac.il/sites/econ/files/working-papers/2017-12.pdf Working paper (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Observations on Cooperation (2020)
Journal Article: Observations on Cooperation (2018)
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:biu:wpaper:2017-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Bar-Ilan University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Department of Economics ().