Choice of Partners in Multiple Two-Person Prisoner's Dilemma Games: An Experimental Study

Abstract

We examine the e ect of unilateral and mutual partner selection in the context of prisoner's dilemmas experimentally. Subjects play s i m ultaneously several nitely repeated two-person prisoner's dilemma games. We nd that unilateral choice is the best system. It leads to low defection and fewer singles than with mutual choice. Furthermore, with the unilateral choice setup we are able to show that intending defectors are more likely to try to avoid a match than intending cooperators. We compare our results of multiple games with single game PD-experiments and nd no di erence in aggregate behavior. Hence the multiple game technique is robust and might therefore be an important tool in the future for testing the use of mixed strategies.

The Speed of Learning in Noisy Games: Partial Reinforcement and the Sustainability of Cooperation

“…When players received deterministic payoffs, either with or without sunspots, our results reproduce those of Selten and Stoecker (1986), Andreoni and Miller (1993) and Hauk and Nagel (2001). Players learn in the first few supergames to cooperate early in the game, and to defect in the periods near the end.…”

“…For example. Reinhard Selten and Rolf Stoecker (1986), James Andreoni and John Miller (1993), and Esther Hauk and Rosemarie Nagel (2001) observe that when people play n-period prisoner's dilemma supergames multiple times, against different players, they often learn to cooperate in the early periods of the supergame, but cooperation breaks down near the end of the supergame. 8 So if other players are slow to learn to cooperate, then the rewards of 7 For this reason there is no cooperation at equilibrium in the simplest model of complete information repeated play with a fixed deadline, but see e.g.…”

Time Horizon and Cooperation in Continuous Time

“…A consistent nding in this literature, including Selten and Stoecker (1986), Andreoni and Miller (1993), Hauk and Nagel (2001) and Bereby-Meyer and Roth (2006), is that close to the end cooperation rates fall more the more 4 See also Palfrey and Rosenthal (1994) who compared contributions to a public good in one shot vs. indenitely repeated games. Engle-Warnick and Slonim (2004) report little dierences when comparing a trust game repeated exactly ve times vs. repeated with a continuation probability of 0.8.…”

Pledges of Commitment and Cooperation in Partnerships

“…1 The review articles [2,3] provides excellent surveys of the existing literature on public goods game experiments and various modifications that aid or hinder sustaining cooperation in this environment. 2 Previous studies of endogenous group formation [4][5][6][7][8] find that the introduction of endogenous group formation increases cooperation and welfare when compared to exogenous regrouping protocols (see [9] for an exception to this result). Our focus is different: we ask whether the addition of pledges of commitment in an endogenous group formation setting can provide additional increases in cooperation and welfare.…”