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Not all Prisoner’s Dilemma games are equal : Incentives, social preferences, and cooperation

Author

Listed:
  • Frederic Moisan

    (EM - EMLyon Business School)

  • Robert ten Brincke
  • Ryan O. Murphy
  • Cleotilde Gonzalez

Abstract

The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) is a classic decision problem where 2 players simultaneously must decide whether to cooperate or to act in their own narrow self-interest. The PD game has been used to model many naturally occurring interactive situations, at the personal, organizational, and social levels, in which there exists a tension between individual material gain and the common good. At least 2 factors may influence the emergence of cooperative behavior in this well-known collective action problem: the incentive structure of the game itself, and the intrinsic social preferences of each of the players. We present a framework that integrates these 2 factors in an effort to account for patterns of high or low cooperation from repeated choice interactions. In an experiment using a collection of different PD games, and a measure of individual social preferences, we identify regions of PD games in which (a) cooperation is independent of social preferences; (b) nice people can be exploited; and (c) being nice is consistently rewarded.

Suggested Citation

  • Frederic Moisan & Robert ten Brincke & Ryan O. Murphy & Cleotilde Gonzalez, 2018. "Not all Prisoner’s Dilemma games are equal : Incentives, social preferences, and cooperation," Post-Print hal-03188213, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03188213
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03188213v1
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    6. repec:grz:wpsses:2013-05 is not listed on IDEAS
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    1. Gächter, Simon & Lee, Kyeongtae & Sefton, Martin & Weber, Till O., 2024. "The role of payoff parameters for cooperation in the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 166(C).
    2. Frank Schweitzer & Luca Verginer & Giacomo Vaccario, 2020. "Should The Government Reward Cooperation? Insights From An Agent-Based Model Of Wealth Redistribution," Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 23(07), pages 1-19, November.
    3. Hanshu Zhang & Frederic Moisan & Palvi Aggarwal & Cleotilde Gonzalez, 2022. "Truth-Telling in a Sender-Receiver Game : Social Value Orientation and Incentives," Post-Print hal-04325602, HAL.
    4. Simon Gaechter & Kyeongtae Lee & Martin Sefton, 2020. "Risk, Temptation, and Efficiency in Prisoner's Dilemmas," Discussion Papers 2020-15, The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
    5. Kurt A. Ackermann & Ryan O. Murphy, 2019. "Explaining Cooperative Behavior in Public Goods Games: How Preferences and Beliefs Affect Contribution Levels," Games, MDPI, vol. 10(1), pages 1-34, March.

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