Divided Loyalists or Conditional Cooperators? Creating Consensus about Cooperation in Multiple Simultaneous Social Dilemmas

Matthew McCarter, Anya Samak and Roman Sheremeta
Additional contact information
Matthew McCarter: University of Texas – San Antonio and Economic Science Institute
Anya Samak: University of Wisconsin – Madison
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Anya Savikhin Samek

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: The current social dilemma literature lacks theoretical consensus regarding how individuals behave when facing multiple simultaneous social dilemmas. The divided-loyalty hypothesis, from organizational theory, predicts that cooperation will decline as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. The conditional-cooperation hypothesis, from behavioral economics, predicts that cooperation will increase as individuals experience multiple social dilemmas with different compared to the same group members. We employ a laboratory experiment to create consensus between these literatures and find support for the conditional-cooperation hypothesis. The positive effect of interacting with different group members comes from participants having an opportunity to shift their cooperative behavior from the less cooperative to the more cooperative group.

Keywords: cooperation; conditional cooperation; defection; loyalty; experiments; public goods; social dilemmas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cdm, nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-soc
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

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Working Paper: Divided Loyalists or Conditional Cooperators? Creating Consensus About Cooperation in Multiple Simultaneous Social Dilemmas (2014)
Working Paper: Divided Loyalists or Conditional Cooperators? Creating Consensus about Cooperation in Multiple Simultaneous Social Dilemmas (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:14-16

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