Not all Prisoner’s Dilemma games are equal: Incentives, social preferences, and cooperation

Frederic Moisan (), Robert ten Brincke, Ryan O. Murphy and Cleotilde Gonzalez
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Frederic Moisan: EM - EMLyon Business School

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Abstract: The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) is a classic decision problem where 2 players simultaneously must decide whether to cooperate or to act in their own narrow self-interest. The PD game has been used to model many naturally occurring interactive situations, at the personal, organizational, and social levels, in which there exists a tension between individual material gain and the common good. At least 2 factors may influence the emergence of cooperative behavior in this well-known collective action problem: the incentive structure of the game itself, and the intrinsic social preferences of each of the players. We present a framework that integrates these 2 factors in an effort to account for patterns of high or low cooperation from repeated choice interactions. In an experiment using a collection of different PD games, and a measure of individual social preferences, we identify regions of PD games in which (a) cooperation is independent of social preferences; (b) nice people can be exploited; and (c) being nice is consistently rewarded.

Keywords: prisoner's dilemma; cooperation; social preferences; social value orientation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-10-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03188213v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Decision, 2018, 5 (4), 306-322 p

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