Can Violence Harm Cooperation? Experimental Evidence

Giacomo De Luca, Petros Sekeris and Dominic Spengler

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: While folk theorems for dynamic renewable common pool resource games sustain cooperation as an equilibrium, the possibility of reverting to violence to appropriate the resource destroys the incentives to cooperate, because of the expectation of conflict when resources are sufficiently depleted. In this paper, we provide experimental evidence that individuals behave according to the theoretical predictions. For high stocks of resources, when conflict is a highly costly activity, participants cooperate less than in the control group, and they play the non-cooperative action with higher frequency. This comes as a consequence of the (correct) anticipation that, when resources run low, the conflict option is used by a large share of participants.

Keywords: Experiment; Dynamic Game; Cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 C91 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-04-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-soc
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Related works:
Journal Article: Can violence harm cooperation? Experimental evidence (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:63697

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