Communication and cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma games

Eric Bahel, Sheryl Ball and Sudipta Sarangi

Games and Economic Behavior, 2022, vol. 133, issue C, 126-137

Abstract: We consider a Prisoner's Dilemma model with a pre-play communication stage. Players get a disutility from deceiving others after sending a message of conditional cooperation. Each player's realized lying aversion cost is private information. We prove existence and characterize the (unique) symmetric perfect Bayesian equilibrium that maximizes cooperation. In this distinguished equilibrium, the frequency of cooperation decreases as material gains from lying (or losses from being deceived) increase. We introduce an iterated procedure allowing to characterize the set of rationalizable strategies. We find that cooperation may decrease as a population starts to value honesty more. We extend the model to account for the possibility of a benefit obtained when lying or the effect of the audience size.

Keywords: Cooperation; Prisoner's Dilemma; Lie aversion; Perfect Bayesian equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825622000537
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:133:y:2022:i:c:p:126-137

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2022.02.008

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 ().