Cooperation in a Company: A Large-Scale Experiment

Abstract

We analyze cooperation within a company setting in order to study the relationship between cooperative attitudes and financial as well as non-financial rewards. In total, 910 employees of a large software company participate in an incentivized online experiment. We observe high levels of cooperation and the typical conditional contribution patterns in a modified public goods game. When linking experiment and company record data, we observe that cooperative attitudes of employees do not pay off in terms of financial rewards within the company. Rather, cooperative employees receive non-financial benefits such as recognition or friendship as the main reward medium. In contrast to most studies in the experimental laboratory, sustained levels of cooperation in our company setting relate to non-financial values of cooperation rather than solely to financial incentives.

Reciprocity supports cooperation in real-world collective action networks

“…[6,22] Further research on conditional cooperation suggests that individuals exhibit patterns of behavior that can be classified into three broad types: conditional cooperators (who cooperate contingent on the cooperation of the rest of the group), altruists (who always cooperate), and free-riders (who always defect). [4,17,23,24] These types are rough descriptions of individuals' strategy profiles throughout entire games [4] and they have been robustly verified through replication in in-person [14,23,25] and online experiments. [17,18] Furthermore, individuals' types appear to be consistent when they participate in multiple experiments across time, [23,24] and these types are present across cultural contexts.…”

“…Volk et al [24] tested the stability of conditional cooperators through 3 different waves of experiments, and classified individuals using a correlation method as well, finding a stable range of 56%-60% conditional cooperators. Finally, Deversi et al [25] found approximately 41% conditional cooperators (called "matchers" in text) in a company-wide experiment using a similar clustering classification method. This indicates that members of our club rank considerably higher than most individuals in public goods experiments, and that conditional cooperation and reciprocity may be higher in naturalistic public goods situations among consistent peers with pre-established relationships, or where individuals interact outside of the collective action dilemma.…”

Indian caste names and cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma

“…Another potential limitation of this study is that the data were collected online. Whereas online studies are not automatically better or worse than nononline studies (Arechar et al., 2018; Deversi et al., 2020; Isler et al., 2021; Pereda et al., 2019), online recruitment methods for Indian samples were found to be less diverse across different domains. For instance, Boas et al.…”

Social preferences and sales performance

“…Much less evidence comes from larger‐scale corporations in industrial countries. A recent exception is the work by Deversi et al (2020) discussed below 1…”

“…Much less evidence comes from larger-scale corporations in industrial countries. A recent exception is the work by Deversi et al (2020) discussed below. 1 In this paper, we consider the business, in particular the sales context, of a large Austrian retail chain to examine the implications of heterogeneous social preferences among sales agents who are employed at the firm.…”