The “Human Factor” in Prisoner’s Dilemma Cooperation

Iván Barreda-Tarrazona (), Ainhoa Jaramillo-Gutiérrez, Marina Pavan and Gerardo Sabater-Grande ()
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Gerardo Sabater-Grande: LEE and Department of Economics, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain

No 2021/10, Working Papers from Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain)

Abstract: We design a rich setting to study cooperation in the finitely Repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma (RPD), controlling for beliefs, emotions, and personal characteristics. In the baseline, the subjects play one-shot and repeated games with other human subjects. In the treatment, participants play against an artificial intelligence (AI) trained upon data from the previous “all human” sessions to mimic human decisions. We design the experiment so that our sessions are homogeneous in terms of gender composition, altruism, and reasoning ability. In all games, we elicit players’ beliefs regarding cooperation using an incentive compatible method. Besides, after each individual decision, we collect self-reported information on the main reason for it (rational or emotional). We find that expectations of partner cooperation at the beginning of each task are not significantly different between treatments. Despite this, we observe that initial human cooperation is actually much higher with other humans than with an AI. Cooperation continues to be higher in all periods of the RPD tasks: cooperation rates range between 60% and 80% in the baseline, while they range between 20% and 40% in the AI treatment. Last, decisions appear to be less emotion-driven in the AI treatment. Lack of empathy with, rather than fear of, the machine seems to be driving the results.

Keywords: cooperation; prisoner’s dilemma; artificial intelligence; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-neu
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jau:wpaper:2021/10

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