EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Social preferences and the variability of conditional cooperation

Malte Baader, Simon Gaechter (), Kyeongtae Lee and Martin Sefton
Additional contact information
Simon Gaechter: University of Nottingham
Kyeongtae Lee: Bank of Korea

Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Simon Gächter

No 2022-13, Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham

Abstract: We experimentally examine how the incentive to defect in a social dilemma affects conditional cooperation. In our first study we conduct online experiments in which subjects play eight Sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma games with payoffs systematically varied across games. We find that few second movers are conditionally cooperative (i.e., cooperate if and only if the first mover cooperates) in all eight games. Instead, most second-movers change strategies between games. The rate of conditional cooperation is higher when the own gain from defecting is lower and when the loss imposed on the first mover from defecting is higher. This pattern is consistent with both social preference models and stochastic choice models. To explore which model explains our findings we employ a second study to jointly estimate noise and social preference parameters at the individual level. The majority of our subjects place significantly positive weight on others’ payoffs, supporting the underlying role of social preferences in conditional cooperation.

Keywords: sequential prisoner’s dilemma; conditional cooperation; social preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cedex/documents/paper ... on-paper-2022-13.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Social Preferences and the Variability of Conditional Cooperation (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: Social Preferences and the Variability of Conditional Cooperation (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: Social Preferences and the Variability of Conditional Cooperation (2022) Downloads
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:2022-13

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-02-04
Handle: RePEc:not:notcdx:2022-13