Risk, Temptation, and Efficiency in Prisoner's Dilemmas

Simon Gaechter (), Kyeongtae Lee () and Martin Sefton ()
Additional contact information
Simon Gaechter: University of Nottingham
Kyeongtae Lee: University of Nottingham
Martin Sefton: University of Nottingham
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Simon Gächter

No 2020-15, Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham

Abstract: We examine the effect of payoff variations on cooperation in one-shot prisoner's dilemma games. We focus on three factors: risk, temptation, and efficiency, which we vary as orthogonal treatments. We find that temptation has the largest impact on cooperation. Temptation directly deters cooperation and indirectly harms cooperation by lowering beliefs about the opponent's cooperativeness. Efficiency indirectly affects cooperation through beliefs, but the magnitude of the effect is relatively small compared to temptation. Risk does not have a significant effect on cooperation. Our finding suggests that curbing the level of temptation is the most important way to improve cooperation in social dilemmas.

Keywords: prisoner's dilemma; cooperation; temptation; efficiency; risk (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cedex/documents/paper ... on-paper-2020-15.pdf (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:not:notcdx:2020-15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jose V Guinot Saporta ().