Voluntary versus mandatory information disclosure in the sequential prisoner’s dilemma

Georg Kirchsteiger, Tom Lenaerts and Rémi Suchon

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: In sequential social dilemmas with stranger matching, initiating cooperation is inherently risky for the first mover. The disclosure of the second mover's past actions may be necessary to instigate cooperation. We experimentally compare the effect of mandatory and voluntary disclosure with non-disclosure in a sequential prisoner's dilemma situation. Our results confirm the positive effects of disclosure on cooperation. We also find that voluntary disclosure is as effective as mandatory disclosure, which runs counter to the results of existing literature on this topic. With voluntary disclosure, second movers who have a good track record chose to disclose, suggesting that they anticipate non-disclosure would signal non-cooperativeness. First movers interpret non-disclosure correctly as a signal of non-cooperativeness. Therefore, they cooperate less than half as often when the second mover decides not to disclose.

Keywords: Information disclosure; Sequential social dilemma; Laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Economic Theory, 2024, ⟨10.1007/s00199-024-01563-y⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:hal-04535784

DOI: 10.1007/s00199-024-01563-y

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().