Observability of Partners’ Past Play and Cooperation: Experimental Evidence

Kenju Kamei, Hajime Kobayashi and Tiffany Tsz Kwan Tse

ISER Discussion Paper from Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University

Abstract: The observability of partners’ past play is known to theoretically improve cooperation in an infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma game under random matching. This paper presents evidence from an incentivized experiment that reputational information per se may not improve cooperation. A structural estimation suggests that a certain percentage of players act according to the “Always Defect” strategy, whether or not the reputational information is available. The remaining players adopt available cooperative strategies: specifically, the tit-for-tat strategy when reputational information is not available, and a strategy that conditions on the matched partner’s past play when reputational information is available.

Date: 2021-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iser.osaka-u.ac.jp/library/dp/2021/DP1145.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Observability of partners’ past play and cooperation: Experimental evidence (2022)
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:dpr:wpaper:1145

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISER Discussion Paper from Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Librarian ().