IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mpg/wpaper/2019_12.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Stability of Conditional Cooperation: Egoism Trumps Reciprocity in Social Dilemmas

Author

Listed:
  • Luciano Andreozzi

    (Department of Economics, University of Trento)

  • Matteo Ploner

    (Department of Economics, University of Trento)

  • Ali Seyhun Saral

    (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn)

Abstract

An often-replicated result in the experimental literature on social dilemmas is that a large share of subjects reveal conditionally cooperative preferences. Cooperation generated by this type of preferences is notoriously unstable, as individuals reduce their contributions to the public good in reaction to other subjects free-riding. This has led to the widely-shared conclusion that cooperation observed in experiments (and its collapse) is mostly driven by imperfect reciprocity. In this study, we explore the possibility that reciprocally cooperative preferences may themselves be unstable. We do so by observing the evolution of subjects’ preferences in an anonymously repeated social dilemma. Our results show that a significant fraction of reciprocally cooperative subjects become selfish in the course of the experiment, while the reverse is rarely observed. We are thus driven to the conclusion that egoism is more resistant to exposure to social dilemmas than reciprocity.

Suggested Citation

  • Luciano Andreozzi & Matteo Ploner & Ali Seyhun Saral, 2019. "The Stability of Conditional Cooperation: Egoism Trumps Reciprocity in Social Dilemmas," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2019_12, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    • Handle: RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2019_12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2019_12online.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. 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.
    2. Kirchkamp, Oliver, 2019. "Importing z-Tree data into R," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 22(C), pages 1-2.
    3. Florian Artinger & Filippos Exadaktylos & Hannes Koppel & Lauri Sääksvuori, 2010. "Applying Quadratic Scoring Rule transparently in multiple choice settings: A note," ThE Papers 10/01, Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the University of Granada..
    4. Theo Offerman & Joep Sonnemans & Gijs Van De Kuilen & Peter P. Wakker, 2009. "A Truth Serum for Non-Bayesians: Correcting Proper Scoring Rules for Risk Attitudes ," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 76(4), pages 1461-1489.
    5. Bates, Douglas & Mächler, Martin & Bolker, Ben & Walker, Steve, 2015. "Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4," Journal of Statistical Software, Foundation for Open Access Statistics, vol. 67(i01).
    6. Saral, Ali Seyhun & Schröter, Anna Marie, 2019. "zBrac — A multilanguage tool for z-Tree," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 23(C), pages 59-63.
    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. Vera Popva, 2010. "What renders financial advisors less treacherous? - On commissions and reciprocity -," Jena Economics Research Papers 2010-036, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena.
    2. Fidanoski, Filip & Johnson, Timothy, 2023. "A z-Tree implementation of the Dynamic Experiments for Estimating Preferences [DEEP] method," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 38(C).
    3. Kai Barron, 2021. "Belief updating: does the ‘good-news, bad-news’ asymmetry extend to purely financial domains?," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 24(1), pages 31-58, March.
    4. Kaushik Basu & Leonardo Becchetti & Luca Stanca, 2011. "Experiments with the Traveler’s Dilemma: welfare, strategic choice and implicit collusion," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 37(4), pages 575-595, October.
    5. Ronald Peeters & Leonard Wolk, 2019. "Elicitation of expectations using Colonel Blotto," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 22(1), pages 268-288, March.
    6. Stefan T. Trautmann & Gijs Kuilen, 2015. "Belief Elicitation: A Horse Race among Truth Serums," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 125(589), pages 2116-2135, December.
    7. Blume, Andreas & Lai, Ernest K. & Lim, Wooyoung, 2019. "Eliciting private information with noise: The case of randomized response," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 356-380.
    8. Peeters, Ronald & Vorsatz, Marc, 2021. "Simple guilt and cooperation," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    9. Kan Takeuchi, 2023. "ztree2stata: a data converter for z-Tree and Stata users," Journal of the Economic Science Association, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 9(1), pages 136-146, June.
    10. Cheung, Stephen L. & Johnstone, Lachlan, 2017. "True Overconfidence, Revealed through Actions: An Experiment," IZA Discussion Papers 10545, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    11. Görges, Luise, 2021. "Of housewives and feminists: Gender norms and intra-household division of labour," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    12. Simon Gächter & Elke Renner, 2010. "The effects of (incentivized) belief elicitation in public goods experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 13(3), pages 364-377, September.
    13. Charles Bellemare & Sabine Kröger & Kouamé Marius Sossou, 2018. "Reporting probabilistic expectations with dynamic uncertainty about possible distributions," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 57(2), pages 153-176, October.
    14. Peeters, Ronald & Vorsatz, Marc & Walzl, Markus, 2015. "Beliefs and truth-telling: A laboratory experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 1-12.
    15. Qiu, Jianying & Weitzel, Utz, 2013. "Experimental Evidence on Valuation and Learning with Multiple Priors," MPRA Paper 43974, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Luise Görges, 2021. "Of housewives and feminists: Gender norms and intra-household division of labour," Working Paper Series in Economics 400, University of Lüneburg, Institute of Economics.
    17. Lisa Bruttel & Muhammed Bulutay & Camille Cornand & Frank Heinemann & Adam Zylbersztejn, 2023. "Measuring strategic-uncertainty attitudes," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 26(3), pages 522-549, July.
    18. Fabian Kleine & Manfred Königstein & Balázs Rozsnyói, 2018. "Voluntary Leadership and Asymmetric Endowments in the Investment Game," Games, MDPI, vol. 9(3), pages 1-21, July.
    19. Ahrash Dianat & Christoph Siemroth, 2021. "Improving decisions with market information: an experiment on corporate prediction markets," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 24(1), pages 143-176, March.
    20. Blanco, Mariana & Engelmann, Dirk & Koch, Alexander K. & Normann, Hans-Theo, 2014. "Preferences and beliefs in a sequential social dilemma: a within-subjects analysis," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 122-135.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    reciprocity; conditional cooperation; strategy method;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:mpg:wpaper:2019_12. 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: Marc Martin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mppggde.html .

    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.