Who cooperates in repeated games: The role of altruism, inequity aversion, and demographics

Anna Dreber, Drew Fudenberg and David G. Rand

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2014, vol. 98, issue C, 41-55

Abstract: We explore the extent to which altruism, as measured by giving in a dictator game (DG), accounts for play in a noisy version of the repeated prisoner's dilemma. We find that DG giving is correlated with cooperation in the repeated game when no cooperative equilibria exist, but not when cooperation is an equilibrium. Furthermore, none of the commonly observed strategies are better explained by inequity aversion or efficiency concerns than money maximization. Various survey questions provide additional evidence for the relative unimportance of social preferences. We conclude that cooperation in repeated games is primarily motivated by long-term payoff maximization and that even though some subjects may have other goals, this does not seem to be the key determinant of how play varies with the parameters of the repeated game. In particular, altruism does not seem to be a major source of the observed diversity of play.

Keywords: Cooperation; Prisoner's dilemma; Altruism; Social preferences; Dictator game; Inequity aversion; Survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (60)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268113003053
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Who cooperates in repeated games: The role of altruism, inequity aversion, and demographics (2014)
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:jeborg:v:98:y:2014:i:c:p:41-55

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2013.12.007

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().