Multigame contact and cooperation

Joao Montez, Laferrière, Vincent, Christian Thoeni and Catherine Roux
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Christian Thöni

No 16349, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Many strategic situations involve players repeatedly interacting across multiple games. While there is an extensive experimental literature on the determinants of cooperation in indefinitely repeated games, there is no evidence on how multigame contact affects behavior in these games. In theory, multigame contact should foster cooperation by improving players' ability to punish. We study the effect of multigame contact on cooperation in two preregistered laboratory experiments, where the main treatment consists of subjects playing a pair of indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemmas with either the same partner or with different partners, i.e., respectively with and without multigame contact. In contrast to the theoretical predictions, we find no evidence that multigame contact increases average cooperation rates. Yet, and now in line with theory, we observe that multigame contact has systematic effects on behavior: subjects often link the strategies in the two games when they play with the same partner. Such linkage turns out to be a double-edged sword: while it helps subjects reaching cooperation in both games, it makes cooperation in only one of the games less likely.

Keywords: Cooperation; Repeated games; Prisoner’s dilemma; Multigame contact; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 C91 C92 L41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16349 (application/pdf)

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:cpr:ceprdp:16349

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16349

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().