Does Voluntary Information Disclosure Lead to Less Cooperation than Mandatory Disclosure? Evidence from a Sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma Experiment

Georg Kirchsteiger, Tom Lenaerts and Rémi Suchon

No 2022-26, Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: In sequential social dilemmas with stranger matching, initiating cooperation is inherently risky for the first mover. The disclosure of the second mover’s past actions may be necessary to instigate cooperation. We experimentally compare the effect of mandatory and voluntary disclosure with non disclosure in a sequential prisoner’s dilemma situation. Our results confirm the positive effects of disclosure on cooperation. We also find that voluntary disclosure is as effective as mandatory one, which is surprising given the results of existing literature on this topic. With voluntarydisclosure, second movers with a good track record decided to disclose because they expect that not disclosing signals non-cooperativeness. First movers interpret nondisclosure correctly as a signal of non-cooperativeness. Therefore, they cooperate less than half as often when the second mover does not disclose.

Pages: 65 p.
Date: 2022-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-reg and nep-soc
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Working Paper: Does Voluntary Information Disclosure Lead to Less Cooperation than Mandatory Disclosure? Evidence from a Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma Experiment (2023)
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