Group Size and Cooperation among Strangers

John Duffy and Huan Xie

No 12010, Working Papers from Concordia University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study how group size affects cooperation in an infinitely repeated n-player Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game. In each repetition of the game, groups of size n less than or equal to M are randomly and anonymously matched from a fixed population of size M to play the n-player PD stage game. We provide conditions for which the contagious strategy (Kandori, 1992) sustains a social norm of cooperation among all M players. Our main finding is that if agents are sufficiently patient, a social norm of society-wide cooperation becomes easier to sustain under the contagious strategy as n converges to M.

Keywords: Cooperation; Social Norms; Group Size; Repeated Games; Random Matching; Prisoner's Dilemma (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 C78 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2012-09-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-hpe, nep-mic, nep-net and nep-soc
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Journal Article: Group size and cooperation among strangers (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crd:wpaper:12010

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