Volunteering under population uncertainty

Adrian Hillenbrand and Fabian Winter

Games and Economic Behavior, 2018, vol. 109, issue C, 65-81

Abstract: There is ample evidence that the number of players can have an important impact on the cooperation and coordination behavior of people facing social dilemmas. With extremely few exceptions, the literature on cooperation assumes common knowledge about who is a player and how many players are involved in a certain situation. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is overly restrictive, and not even very common in real-world cooperation problems. We show theoretically and experimentally that uncertainty about the number of players in a Volunteer's Dilemma increases cooperation compared to a situation with a certain number of players. We identify additional behavioral mechanisms amplifying and impairing the effect.

Keywords: Population uncertainty; Volunteer's Dilemma; Coordination; Cooperation; Social norms; Group size uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 D03 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825617302294
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Volunteering under Population Uncertainty (2017)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:109:y:2018:i:c:p:65-81

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2017.12.009

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().