Choice Flexibility and Long-Run Cooperation

Gabriele Camera, Jaehong Kim and David Rojo Arjona
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Jaehong Kim: Xiamen University

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: Cooperation does not empirically scale when strangers confront indefinitely repeated social dilemmas—despite its incentive-compatibility. Here, we investigate if an intervention can mitigate this problem: expanding the action set with partial cooperation choices. Although standard theory predicts no effect, adding interior choices to a rigid binary-choice game often boosted cooperation and efficiency in the laboratory. Under some conditions, groups of strangers achieved outcomes close to those observed in pairs of partners—where adding interior choices, instead, was inconsequential. This suggests that choice rigidities can hinder long-run cooperation.

Keywords: experiments; repeated games; social dilemmas; strategy estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 C90 D03 E02 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-dcm, nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-gth
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:23-05

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