A Public Dilemma: Cooperation with Large Stakes and a Large Audience

Michèle Belot (), V Bhaskar and Jeroen van de Ven ()

Economics Discussion Papers from University of Essex, Department of Economics

Abstract: We analyze a large-stakes prisoner's dilemma game played on a TV show. Players cooperate 40% of the time, demonstrating that social preferences are important; however, cooperation is significantly below the 50% threshold that is required for inequity aversion to sustain cooperation. Women cooperate significantly more than men, while players who have "earned" more of the stake cooperate less. A player's promise to cooperate is also a good predictor of his decision. Surprisingly, a player's probability of cooperation is unrelated to the opponent's characteristics or promise. We argue that inequity aversion alone cannot adequately explain these results; reputational concerns in a public setting might be more important.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-knm
Date: Written
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.essex.ac.uk/economics/discussion-papers/papers-text/dp617.pdf

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esx:essedp:617

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Discussion Papers Administrator, Department of Economics, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, U.K.
http://www.essex.ac. ... /papers-request.shtm

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Discussion Papers from University of Essex, Department of Economics
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Essex Economics Web Manager ().