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When Do We Learn to Cooperate? The Role of Social Learning in Social Dilemmas

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    Abstract

    In this paper, I look at the interaction between social learning and cooperative behavior. I model this using a social dilemma game with publicly observed sequential actions and asymmetric information about payoffs. I find that some informed agents in this model act, individually and without collusion, to conceal the privately optimal action. Because the privately optimal action is socially costly the behavior of informed agents can lead to a Pareto improvement in a social dilemma. In my model I show that it is possible to get cooperative behavior if information is restricted to a small but non-zero proportion of the population. Moreover, such cooperative behavior occurs in a nite setting where it is public knowledge which agent will act last. The proportion of cooperative agents within the population can be made arbitrarily close to 1 by increasing the infinite number of agents playing the game. Finally, I show that under a broad set of conditions that it is a Pareto improvement on a corner value, in the ex-ante welfare sense, for an interior proportion of the population to be informed.

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    File URL: http://www.econ.ed.ac.uk/papers/best_2011_social_learning_social_dilemma.pdf
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    Bibliographic Info

    Paper provided by Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh in its series ESE Discussion Papers with number 206.

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    Length: 31
    Date of creation: 24 Jun 2011
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    Handle: RePEc:edn:esedps:206

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    Keywords: Asymmetric information; cooperation; efficiency; social learning; social dilemmas.;

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