Play it Again: Partner Choice, Reputation Building and Learning in Restarting, Finitely-Repeated Dilemma Games

Kenju Kamei and Louis Putterman

No 2013-8, Working Papers from Brown University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Previous research has shown that opportunities for two-sided partner choice in finitely repeated social dilemma games can promote cooperation through a combination of sorting and opportunistic signaling, with late period defections by selfish players causing an end-game decline. How such experience would affect play of subsequent finitely-repeated games remains unclear. In each of six treatments that vary the cooperation premium and the informational basis for reputation formation, we let sets of subjects play sequences of finitely-repeated voluntary contribution games to study the competing forces of (a) learning about the benefits of reputation, and (b) learning about backward unraveling. We find, inter alia, that with a high cooperation premium and good information, investment in reputation grows across sets of finitely-repeated games.

Keywords: cooperation; reputation; voluntary contribution; public goods; sorting; endogenous grouping; group formation; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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