Strategic ignorance in repeated prisoners’ dilemma experiments and its effects on the dynamics of voluntary cooperation

Lisa Bruttel, Simon Felgendreher (), Werner Güth () and Ralph Hertwig ()
Additional contact information
Simon Felgendreher: University of Gothenburg
Werner Güth: LUISS Università Guido Carli
Ralph Hertwig: Max Planck Institute for Human Development

No 10, CEPA Discussion Papers from Center for Economic Policy Analysis

Abstract: Being ignorant of key aspects of a strategic interaction can represent an advantage rather than a handicap. We study one particular context in which ignorance can be beneficial: iterated strategic interactions in which voluntary cooperation may be sustained into the final round if players voluntarily forego knowledge about the time horizon. We experimentally examine this option to remain ignorant about the time horizon in a finitely repeated two-person prisoners’ dilemma game. We confirm that pairs without horizon knowledge avoid the drop in cooperation that otherwise occurs toward the end of the game. However, this effect is superposed by cooperation declining more rapidly in pairs without horizon knowledge during the middle phase of the game, especially if players do not know that the other player also wanted to remain ignorant of the time horizon.

Keywords: cooperation; experiment; prisoners' dilemma; strategic ignorance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D83 D89 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.25932/publishup-43188 (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:pot:cepadp:10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPA Discussion Papers from Center for Economic Policy Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marco Winkler ().