The use of reputation in repeated dyadic interactions

Misato Inaba and Nobuyuki Takahashi
Additional contact information
Misato Inaba: Kansai University, Japan
Nobuyuki Takahashi: Hokkaido University, Japan

Rationality and Society, 2018, vol. 30, issue 1, 54-79

Abstract: How cooperation is possible has been one of the major puzzles in social sciences. Traditionally, two mechanisms have been proposed to explain cooperation. Cooperation in repeated dyadic interactions has been explained by direct reciprocity, while cooperation between more than two individuals has been explained by indirect reciprocity. Although reputation is theoretically unnecessary to achieve mutual cooperation in repeated dyadic interactions, several experimental studies indicated that people do make use of reputation even in such situations. Therefore, we conducted two experiments to investigate why people make use of reputation in dyadic interactions. Our results revealed that people use reputation because they assume that reputation enables them to predict their partners’ future behaviors in dyadic interactions. We conclude that there is a need to reexamine the system of mechanisms posited to explain the problem of cooperation in particular by expanding the scope of indirect reciprocity.

Keywords: Cooperation; prosociality; reputation mechanism; social exchange (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1043463117717232 (text/html)

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:sae:ratsoc:v:30:y:2018:i:1:p:54-79

DOI: 10.1177/1043463117717232

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Rationality and Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().