Multiple Prisoner's Dilemma Games with (Out) an Outside Option: An Experimental Study

Hauk, Esther

doi:10.2139/ssrn.189429

Cited by 15 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…as predictors of selection and cooperation (19,20). Although our treatment of the outside option is consistent with previous work (16), it is distinct in that it extends it to the case of a dynamic network. Finally, other related work (21,22) has examined how individuals select groups or are excluded by them.…”

supporting

confidence: 81%

“…We find no evidence of the hypothesized threshold effect (9, 10), instead finding significant and positive increases in cooperation at rates well below those previously reported. Finally, and in contrast to both previous studies that considered only one set of payoffs, we manipulate the payoff structure itself, effectively varying the attractiveness of the "outside option" (16), meaning roughly the payoff associated with choosing not to interact with a potential partner. We find that only in the presence of an attractive outside option do conditional cooperators punish defectors (by proactively deleting ties with them).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our work is also related more generally to a number of recent experiments that have investigated various aspects of the relationship between cooperation and partner selection, such as unilateral vs. bilateral choice (17,18), the effect of introducing an outside option of varying attractiveness (16), and the attributes of the individuals (age, sex, race, etc.) as predictors of selection and cooperation (19,20).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Cooperation and assortativity with dynamic partner updating

Wang

Suri

Watts

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

192

219

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The natural tendency for humans to make and break relationships is thought to facilitate the emergence of cooperation. In particular, allowing conditional cooperators to choose with whom they interact is believed to reinforce the rewards accruing to mutual cooperation while simultaneously excluding defectors. Here we report on a series of human subjects experiments in which groups of 24 participants played an iterated prisoner's dilemma game where, critically, they were also allowed to propose and delete links to players of their own choosing at some variable rate. Over a wide variety of parameter settings and initial conditions, we found that dynamic partner updating significantly increased the level of cooperation, the average payoffs to players, and the assortativity between cooperators. Even relatively slow update rates were sufficient to produce large effects, while subsequent increases to the update rate had progressively smaller, but still positive, effects. For standard prisoner's dilemma payoffs, we also found that assortativity resulted predominantly from cooperators avoiding defectors, not by severing ties with defecting partners, and that cooperation correspondingly suffered. Finally, by modifying the payoffs to satisfy two novel conditions, we found that cooperators did punish defectors by severing ties, leading to higher levels of cooperation that persisted for longer.network science | dynamic networks | web-based experiments W hy, and under what circumstances, presumptively selfish individuals cooperate is a question of longstanding interest to social science (1, 2) and one that has been studied extensively in laboratory experiments, often as some variant of a public goods game (also called a voluntary contribution mechanism) or a prisoner's dilemma (see refs. 2 and 3 for surveys). One broadly replicated result from this literature is that in unmodified, finitely repeated games cooperation levels typically start around 50-60% and steadily decline to around 10% in the final few rounds (2). The explanation for this decline is that when conditional cooperators, who are thought to constitute as much as 50% of the population (4), are forced to interact with a heterogeneous mix of other types, in particular free riders, the conditional cooperators tend to reduce their contributions over time (3).Previous work has shown that explicit enforcement mechanisms such as punishment (5) and reward (6) can alleviate the observed decline in cooperation in fixed groups. Here we investigate a related but distinct mechanism that exploits a wellknown feature of human social interactions-namely that they change over time, as individuals form new relationships or sever existing ones (7). By allowing participants engaged in a repeated game of cooperation to update their interaction partners dynamically, cooperation levels might be enhanced in two ways. First, conditional cooperators could implicitly punish defectors by denying them a partner, thereby encouraging potential defectors to cooperate. Second, conditional coope...

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confidence: 81%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Cooperation and assortativity with dynamic partner updating

Wang

Suri

Watts

2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

192

219

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“…In particular, cooperation is often sustained by the threat of a future punishment or the promise of a future reward (3)(4)(5)(6). Preferential interactions are beneficial in heterogeneous populations, where long-lasting relationships are formed with beneficial partners and not with detrimental ones (7)(8)(9)(10). Although distinct, both mechanisms are often interdependent, for example when punishment takes the form of terminating a beneficial relationship (7)(8)(9)(10).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Preferential interactions are beneficial in heterogeneous populations, where long-lasting relationships are formed with beneficial partners and not with detrimental ones (7)(8)(9)(10). Although distinct, both mechanisms are often interdependent, for example when punishment takes the form of terminating a beneficial relationship (7)(8)(9)(10). Preferential interactions are often studied in the context of incomplete information, where signals indicate (explicitly or implicitly) whether their sender is a beneficial partner (7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12).…”

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confidence: 99%

Preferential interactions promote blind cooperation and informed defection

Pérez‐Escudero

Friedman

Gore

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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It is common sense that costs and benefits should be carefully weighed before deciding on a course of action. However, we often disapprove of people who do so, even when their actual decision benefits us. For example, we prefer people who directly agree to do us a favor over those who agree only after securing enough information to ensure that the favor will not be too costly. Why should we care about how people make their decisions, rather than just focus on the decisions themselves? Current models show that punishment of information gathering can be beneficial because it forces blind decisions, which under some circumstances enhances cooperation. Here we show that aversion to information gathering can be beneficial even in the absence of punishment, due to a different mechanism: preferential interactions with reliable partners. In a diverse population where different people have different-and unknown-preferences, those who seek additional information before agreeing to cooperate reveal that their preferences are close to the point where they would choose not to cooperate. Blind cooperators are therefore more likely to keep cooperating even if conditions change, and aversion to information gathering helps to interact preferentially with them. Conversely, blind defectors are more likely to keep defecting in the future, leading to a preference for informed defectors over blind ones. Both mechanisms-punishment to force blind decisions and preferential interactions-give qualitatively different predictions, which may enable experimental tests to disentangle them in realworld situations.cooperation | signaling | population heterogeneity | game theory | incomplete information W hy didn't you ask before? This question too often lacks a reasonable answer. Consider the case of Alice who, learning that her friend Bob was visiting her city, rushed to invite him to stay at her place-only to find, once the offer had been gratefully accepted, that Bob would occupy her living room for a whole month. Most people would agree: Alice should have asked before.However, Alice's behavior is not uncommon. We often refrain from gathering information about the costs and benefits of our interactions with others, and often with good reason: When the situation is reversed, we prefer people who directly agree to do us a favor over those who only agree after carefully weighing costs and benefits. Why do we have this preference? If someone agrees to do us a favor-or to cooperate with us in any other way-why should we care about how they made their decision?Intuitively, aversion to information gathering can be beneficial because it makes us prefer people who are more likely to cooperate. In addition, people who would in principle want to gather information may be inhibited by others' aversion to it. To illustrate these two mechanisms, let us first consider a simple scenario in which two types of people exist: unreliable and reliable. Unreliable types only cooperate in a limited set of conditions and need to gather additional information to deci...

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