Individual versus Group Play in the Repeated Coordinated Resistance Game

This paper reports an experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of repeated interactions in deterring leaders’ from using divide-and-conquer strategies to extract surplus from their subordinates, when every decision-maker involved is a group instead of an individual. We find that both the resistance rate by subordinates and the divide-and-conquer transgression rate by leaders are the same in the group and individual repeated coordinated resistance games. Similar to the individual game, adding communication to the group game can help deter opportunistic behavior by the leaders even in the presence of repetition.