Voluntary Disclosure of Information and Cooperation in Simultaneous-Move Economic Interactions

Kenju Kamei

No 2019_03, Department of Economics Working Papers from Durham University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies individuals’ voluntary disclosure of past behaviors and its effects in simultaneous-move dilemma interactions. Using a laboratory experiment with a finitely repeated two-player public goods game, I found that voluntary information disclosure strengthens cooperation under certain conditions, although a non-negligible fraction of individuals do not disclose information about the past and proceed to behave opportunistically. On closer inspection, the data revealed that the material incentives of disclosure acts differ according to the matching protocol. Specifically, disclosers receive higher payoffs than non-disclosers if the disclosers are assured to be matched with like-minded disclosers; conversely, disclosers are vulnerable to exploitation by others under random matching. A direct consequence of the presence of non-disclosers (and the required payment in costly disclosure treatments) is that individuals can achieve higher efficiency where disclosure is mandatory rather than voluntary. This result suggests that the elimination of an option to hide past behaviors helps enhance economic efficiency if individuals’ opportunistic behaviors are liable to precipitate a collapse in the community norms.

Keywords: experiment; information disclosure; cooperation; dilemma; repeated games; reputation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D74 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-04
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.dur.ac.uk/resources/business/research/EconWP19_03.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: Voluntary disclosure of information and cooperation in simultaneous-move economic interactions (2020)
Working Paper: Voluntary Disclosure of Information and Cooperation in Simultaneous-Move Economic Interactions (2020)
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:2019_03

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 ().