Pledges of Commitment and Cooperation in Partnerships

Abstract

We use experimental methods to investigate whether pledges of commitment can improve cooperation in endogenously-formed partnerships facing a social dilemma. Treatments vary in terms of the individual's: (1) opportunity to commit to their partner; (2) the cost of dissolving committed partnerships; and (3) the distribution of these dissolution costs between partners. Our findings show that pledges of commitment alone can increase cooperation and welfare in committed partnerships. The introduction of relatively large and equally split costs yields similar gains. In contrast, when costs to dissolve committed partnerships fall solely on the individual choosing to break up, pledges of commitment fail to improve cooperation and welfare.

Defectors’ intolerance of others promotes cooperation in the repeated public goods game with opting out

“…For two-player PGG (i.e., m = 2 ), our analytic results show that opting out against Defect leads to stable coexistence of C and D in the population. This outcome is similar to previous theoretical and empirical studies for the repeated Prisoner's dilemma (PD) game (e.g., [9][10][11][12]15 ) and consistent with the finding that group partners are more cooperative when committed to each other in two-player repeated PGG 16 . On the other hand, it is also shown that opting out if your partner does not share your strategy leads to the highest possible level of cooperation due to the increased positive assortment of CC and DD pairs.…”