IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-04638314.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Growing Cooperation

Author

Listed:
  • Rémi Suchon

    (UCL - Université catholique de Lille, ANTHROPO LAB - Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Expérimentale - ETHICS EA 7446 - Experience ; Technology & Human Interactions ; Care & Society : - ICL - Institut Catholique de Lille - UCL - Université catholique de Lille, ETHICS EA 7446 - Experience ; Technology & Human Interactions ; Care & Society : - ICL - Institut Catholique de Lille - UCL - Université catholique de Lille)

  • Georg Kirchsteiger
  • Tom Lenaerts

Abstract

Cooperation is one of the most important determinants of the success of human groups. However, groups do not always succeed in developing norms of cooperation, especially with anonymous interactions. For instance, cooperation is seldom observed in indefinitely repeated prisoners dilemma experiments with stranger matching. This is the case even when the time horizon, the size of the community and the payoff from cooperation make cooperation theoretically sustainable. In this paper, we test whether initiating small groups that gradually expand foster cooperation in an indefinitely repeated stranger-matching prisoner dilemma game. Starting small is a common and intuitive way to build large groups. It may provide suitable conditions to develop virtuous norms of cooperation. However, whether such a mechanism is effective has not been tested in a clean lab experiment. Our experiment comprises 3 parts. In each part, participants play an indefinitely repeated prisoners dilemma. In the baseline, matching groups start out large, with 8 members. The matching groups remain fixed for the 3 parts of the experiment, and participants interact with strangers for the length of the experiment within their marching group of 8. In the treatment, groups start out small and then grow larger: In the first part, participants are matched in pairs and play the indefinitely repeated prisoners dilemma in partners' matching. In the second part, each pair is merged with another randomly selected pair, and participants play the indefinitely repeated prisoners dilemma in stranger matching within the resulting group of 4. In the last part, each group of 4 is merged with another randomly selected group of 4, and participants play the indefinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma in stranger matching within the resulting group of 8. We find that cooperation is significantly higher in the treatment. We also find that, in the treatment, cooperation decreases as the size of the community increases. This is mostly due to a substantial decrease in cooperation between the first and the second part, i.e. when matching switches from partner to stranger. Turning to our main hypothesis, we find that cooperation in the third part of the experiment is significantly higher in the treatment, where growth was experienced, than in the baseline. This suggests that letting groups grow from small to big provides suitable conditions to develop a norm of cooperation.

Suggested Citation

  • Rémi Suchon & Georg Kirchsteiger & Tom Lenaerts, 2024. "Growing Cooperation," Post-Print hal-04638314, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04638314
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Daniele Nosenzo & Simone Quercia & Martin Sefton, 2015. "Cooperation in small groups: the effect of group size," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 18(1), pages 4-14, March.
    2. Camera, Gabriele & Casari, Marco & Bigoni, Maria, 2012. "Cooperative strategies in anonymous economies: An experiment," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 75(2), pages 570-586.
    3. Alexander Peysakhovich & David G. Rand, 2016. "Habits of Virtue: Creating Norms of Cooperation and Defection in the Laboratory," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 62(3), pages 631-647, March.
    4. Urs Fischbacher, 2007. "z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 10(2), pages 171-178, June.
    5. Drew Fudenberg & David G. Rand & Anna Dreber, 2012. "Slow to Anger and Fast to Forgive: Cooperation in an Uncertain World," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(2), pages 720-749, April.
    6. Florian Engl & Arno Riedl & Roberto Weber, 2021. "Spillover Effects of Institutions on Cooperative Behavior, Preferences, and Beliefs," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 13(4), pages 261-299, November.
    7. Ernst Fehr & Ivo Schurtenberger, 2018. "Normative foundations of human cooperation," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 2(7), pages 458-468, July.
    8. Glenn Ellison, 1994. "Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma with Anonymous Random Matching," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 61(3), pages 567-588.
    9. R. Mark Isaac & James M. Walker, 1988. "Group Size Effects in Public Goods Provision: The Voluntary Contributions Mechanism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 103(1), pages 179-199.
    10. Mario Molina & Victor Nee & Hakan Holm, 2023. "Cooperation with Strangers: Spillover of Community Norms," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 34(6), pages 2315-2331, November.
    11. James R. Bland, 2020. "Heterogeneous trembles and model selection in the strategy frequency estimation method," Journal of the Economic Science Association, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 6(2), pages 113-124, December.
    12. Pedro Dal Bo & Guillaume R. Frochette, 2011. "The Evolution of Cooperation in Infinitely Repeated Games: Experimental Evidence," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(1), pages 411-429, February.
    13. Pedro Dal Bó & Guillaume R. Fréchette, 2019. "Strategy Choice in the Infinitely Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 109(11), pages 3929-3952, November.
    14. Huck, Steffen & Normann, Hans-Theo & Oechssler, Jorg, 2004. "Two are few and four are many: number effects in experimental oligopolies," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 53(4), pages 435-446, April.
    15. Dorothée Honhon & Kyle Hyndman, 2020. "Flexibility and Reputation in Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma Games," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(11), pages 4998-5014, November.
    16. Ghidoni, Riccardo & Cleave, Blair L. & Suetens, Sigrid, 2019. "Perfect and imperfect strangers in social dilemmas," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 148-159.
    17. Elinor Ostrom, 2000. "Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 14(3), pages 137-158, Summer.
    18. Maria Bigoni & Gabriele Camera & Marco Casari, 2019. "Partners or Strangers? Cooperation, Monetary Trade, and the Choice of Scale of Interaction," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 11(2), pages 195-227, May.
    19. Charness, Gary & Yang, Chun-Lei, 2014. "Starting small toward voluntary formation of efficient large groups in public goods provision," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 119-132.
    20. Pedro Dal Bó & Guillaume R. Fréchette, 2018. "On the Determinants of Cooperation in Infinitely Repeated Games: A Survey," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 56(1), pages 60-114, March.
    21. Ernst Fehr & Urs Fischbacher, 2004. "Social norms and human cooperation," Macroeconomics 0409026, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    22. Eva Ranehill & Frédéric Schneider & Roberto A. Weber, 2012. "Growing groups, cooperation, and the rate of entry," ECON - Working Papers 103, Department of Economics - University of Zurich, revised May 2013.
    23. Michihiro Kandori, 1992. "Social Norms and Community Enforcement," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 59(1), pages 63-80.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Heller, Yuval & Tubul, Itay, 2023. "Strategies in the repeated prisoner’s dilemma: A cluster analysis," MPRA Paper 117444, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Maria Bigoni & Gabriele Camera & Marco Casari, 2019. "Partners or Strangers? Cooperation, Monetary Trade, and the Choice of Scale of Interaction," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 11(2), pages 195-227, May.
    3. Maria Bigoni & Gabriele Camera & Marco Casari, 2019. "Cooperation among strangers with and without a monetary system," Working Papers 19-01, Chapman University, Economic Science Institute.
    4. Normann, Hans-Theo & Sternberg, Martin, 2022. "Human-algorithm interaction: Algorithmic pricing in hybrid laboratory markets," DICE Discussion Papers 392, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    5. Normann, Hans-Theo & Sternberg, Martin, 2023. "Human-algorithm interaction: Algorithmic pricing in hybrid laboratory markets," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    6. Duffy, John & Xie, Huan, 2016. "Group size and cooperation among strangers," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 126(PA), pages 55-74.
    7. Bigoni, Maria & Camera, Gabriele & Casari, Marco, 2013. "Strategies of cooperation and punishment among students and clerical workers," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 172-182.
    8. Kamei, Kenju, 2020. "Group size effect and over-punishment in the case of third party enforcement of social norms," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 395-412.
    9. Teyssier, Sabrina & Wieczorek, Boris, 2025. "Inequality, social norms and cooperation: Strategy choice in the infinitely socially iterated prisoner’s dilemma," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 229(C).
    10. Ghidoni, Riccardo & Suetens, Sigrid, 2019. "Empirical Evidence on Repeated Sequential Games," Other publications TiSEM ff3a441f-e196-4e45-ba59-c, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    11. Bigoni, Maria & Camera, Gabriele & Casari, Marco, 2020. "Money is more than memory," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 99-115.
    12. Kenju Kamei, 2019. "Cooperation and endogenous repetition in an infinitely repeated social dilemma," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 48(3), pages 797-834, September.
    13. Eugenio Proto & Aldo Rustichini & Andis Sofianos, 2020. "Intelligence, Errors and Strategic Choices in the Repeated Prisoners Dilemma," Working Papers 2020_07, Business School - Economics, University of Glasgow.
    14. Gallo, Edoardo & Riyanto, Yohanes E. & Roy, Nilanjan & Teh, Tat-How, 2019. "Cooperation in an Uncertain and Dynamic World," MPRA Paper 97878, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Jan Schmitz, 2019. "When Two Become One: How Group Mergers Affect Solidarity," Games, MDPI, vol. 10(3), pages 1-42, July.
    16. Xu, Xue & Zheng, Kun, 2024. "Private monitoring revisited: When does a shared history matter?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 112(C).
    17. Marco Lambrecht & Eugenio Proto & Aldo Rustichini & Andis Sofianos, 2024. "Intelligence Disclosure and Cooperation in Repeated Interactions," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 16(3), pages 199-231, August.
    18. Bigoni, Maria & Casari, Marco & Salvanti, Andrea & Skrzypacz, Andrzej & Spagnolo, Giancarlo, 2022. "It’s Payback Time: New Insights on Cooperation in the Repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma," IZA Discussion Papers 15023, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    19. Hans-Theo Normann & Martin Sternberg, 2021. "Human-Algorithm Interaction: Algorithmic Pricing in Hybrid Laboratory Markets," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2021_11, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, revised 13 Apr 2022.
    20. Otten, Kasper & Buskens, Vincent & Przepiorka, Wojtek & Cherki, Boaz & Israel, Salomon, 2024. "Cooperation, punishment, and group change in multilevel public goods experiments," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 164(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04638314. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.