Cooperation and Endogenous Repetition in an Infinitely Repeated Social Dilemma

A large body of theoretical and experimental literature suggests that exogenously imposed infinite repetition can mitigate people’s opportunistic behavior in dilemma situations through personal enforcement. But, do people collectively choose to interact with the same persons, when there is an alternative with random matching? In a framework of an indefinitely-repeated collective action dilemma game, we let subjects collectively choose whether to (i) play with specific others for all rounds or to (ii) play with randomly matched counterparts in every period. The experiment showed that most subjects collectively select the partner matching option. It also indicated that groups achieve a higher level of cooperation when subjects collectively select option (i) by voting, compared with when the same option is exogenously imposed. These findings have an implication that people’s equilibrium selection may be affected by how the basic rules of games are introduced (endogenously or exogenously) to them.