When Do We Learn to Cooperate? The Role of Social Learning in Social Dilemmas

James A. Best ()

Edinburgh School of Economics Discussion Paper Series from Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh

Abstract: In this paper, I look at the interaction between social learning and cooperative behavior. I model this using a social dilemma game with publicly observed sequential actions and asymmetric information about payoffs. I find that some informed agents in this model act, individually and without collusion, to conceal the privately optimal action. Because the privately optimal action is socially costly the behavior of informed agents can lead to a Pareto improvement in a social dilemma. In my model I show that it is possible to get cooperative behavior if information is restricted to a small but non-zero proportion of the population. Moreover, such cooperative behavior occurs in a finite setting where it is public knowledge which agent will act last. The proportion of cooperative agents within the population can be made arbitrarily close to 1 by increasing the finite number of agents playing the game. Finally, I show that under a broad set of conditions that it is a Pareto improvement on a corner value, in the ex-ante welfare sense, for an interior proportion of the population to be informed.

Keywords: asymmetric information; cooperation; efficiency; social learning; social dilemmas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D62 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31
Date: 2011-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cta, nep-evo, nep-gth and nep-soc
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:edn:esedps:206

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