Cooperating Over Losses and Competing Over Gains: a Social Dilemma Experiment

Alessandro Ispano and Peter Schwardmann
Additional contact information
Peter Schwardmann: University of Munich

No 23, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: Evidence from studies in international relations, the politics of reform, collective action and price competition suggests that economic agents in social dilemma situations cooperate more to avoid losses than in the pursuit of gains. To test whether the prospect of losses can induce cooperation, we let experimental subjects play the travelers dilemma in the gain and loss domain. Subjects cooperate substantially more over losses. Furthermore, our results suggest that this treatment effect is best explained by reference-dependent risk preferences and reference-dependent strategic sophistication. We discuss the implications of our results and relate our findings to other experimental games played in the loss domain.

Keywords: Travelers dilemma; loss domain; diminishing sensitivity; strategic sophistication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D01 D03 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://rationality-and-competition.de/wp-content/ ... cussion_paper/23.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Cooperating over losses and competing over gains: A social dilemma experiment (2017)
Working Paper: Cooperating over losses and competing over gains: a social dilemma experiment (2016)
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:rco:dpaper:23

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Viviana Lalli ().