 Social surplus determines cooperation rates in the one-shot Prisoner's DilemmaGary Charness, Luca Rigotti and Aldo Rustichini Games and Economic Behavior, 2016, vol. 100, issue C, 113-124 Abstract: We provide evidence on how cooperation rates vary across payoff parameters in the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD), using four one-shot games that differ only in the payoffs from mutual cooperation. In our experiment, participants play only the PD game, and play the game once and only once, so there are no potential confounds or methodological issues. Our results show that higher monetary payoffs from cooperation are associated with substantially higher cooperation rates, which increase monotonically from 23% to 60%. Participants' beliefs about cooperation rates track closely actual cooperation rates: higher cooperation is expected from others when mutual cooperation payoffs are higher. This is true also for participants who, in a follow-up experiment, only make guesses about the choices of others. Keywords: Prisoner's Dilemma; Cooperation rates; Beliefs; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:100:y:2016:i:c:p:113-124 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2016.08.010 Access Statistics for this article Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.