Revealed reputations in the finitely repeated prisoners’ dilemma

Caleb Cox, Matthew Jones (), Kevin Pflum () and Paul Healy ()

Economic Theory, 2015, vol. 58, issue 3, 484 pages

Abstract: In a sequential-move, finitely repeated prisoners’ dilemma game (FRPD), cooperation can be sustained if the first-mover believes her opponent might be a behavioral type who plays a tit-for-tat strategy in every period. We test this theory by revealing second-mover histories from an earlier FRPD experiment to their current opponent. Despite eliminating the possibility of reputation-building, aggregate cooperation actually increases when histories are revealed. Cooperative histories lead to increased trust, but negative histories do not cause decreased trust. We develop a behavioral model to explain these findings. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: Prisoners’ dilemma; Finitely repeated games; Cooperation; Reputation-building; C70; C73; C92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00199-015-0863-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:joecth:v:58:y:2015:i:3:p:441-484

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/199/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00199-015-0863-1

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory is currently edited by Nichoals Yanneils

More articles in Economic Theory from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().