Talkin' Bout Cooperation

Ali Ozkes and Nobuyuki Hanaki

No 08/2020, Department for Strategy and Innovation Working Paper Series from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Abstract: We experimentally study the interaction of the effects of the strategic environment and com- munication on the observed levels of cooperation in two-person finitely repeated games with a Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibrium. We replicate previous findings that point to higher levels of tacit cooperation under strategic complementarity compared to strategic substitution. In our data, however, this is not due to differences in levels of reciprocity as suggested previously. Instead, we find that slow learning and noisy choices might drive this effect. When subjects are allowed to communicate in free-form online chat before making choices, cooperation levels increase significantly to the extent that the difference in the two strategic environments dis- appears. A machine-assisted natural language processing approach shows how the content of communication differs in the two strategic environments.

Keywords: Communication; Cooperation; Reinforcement learning; Strategic environment; Structural topic modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-exp and nep-gth
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://epub.wu.ac.at/7505/ original version (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (https://epub.wu.ac.at/7505/ [308 PERMANENT REDIRECT]--> https://epub.wu.ac.at/id/eprint/7505 [302 FOUND]--> https://research.wu.ac.at/en/publications/10285079-d058-4daa-979e-0a1418380121)

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:wiw:wus055:7505

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department for Strategy and Innovation Working Paper Series from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WU Library ().