Local and global information affect cooperation in networked Prisoner’s dilemma games

In this letter, we report preliminary experimental evidence of the role of local and global information on networks of a repeated Prisoner’s dilemma game. Namely, we consider three groups of players. In groups one and two, the selection of the game strategies is made upon knowledge of local and global information, respectively. In group three, instead, players are free to choose at each round of the dilemma whether to have access to local or global information for the decision of their next strategic actions. Our experiments reveal that various behavioral patterns are generated in each group. Additionally, we find that agents are more willing to cooperate when they have access to global information, or when they have the option to freely choose between global and local information. On the other hand, with the availability of local information, agents tend to adopt a conservative strategy of defection, where at least they incur no losses. Even though our study has been objectively limited to only few experimental trials (due to the current pandemic situation which has strongly affected our ability of collecting in a same room a consistent number of young University’s students), the results seem to indicate that there is an important role of local and global information which may deserve further investigation as soon as the current limitations are overcome and such kind of experiments could be conducted in a much larger number of trials, and with a much larger number of involved agents.