Incremental Commitment and Reciprocity in a Real-Time Public Goods Game

Kurzban, Robert; McCabe, Kevin; Smith, Vernon L.; Wilson, Bart J.

doi:10.1177/01461672012712009

Cited by 138 publications

(99 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Clearly, the notion of type must be understood with respect to a particular class of decisions; if cooperation is very costly, we presume universal defection would obtain (21). Nonetheless, our results add to the growing body of research that suggests that reciprocity is an important motive in group contexts across a range of institutional arrangements (45,46). Additional work will be required to determine the conditions under which players separate into types, including conditional cooperative ones, and which institutions have the effect of homogenizing play.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Experiments investigating cooperative types in humans: A complement to evolutionary theory and simulations

Kurzban

Houser

2005

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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355

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Unlike other species, humans cooperate in large, distantly related groups, a fact that has long presented a puzzle to biologists. The pathway by which adaptations for large-scale cooperation among nonkin evolved in humans remains a subject of vigorous debate. Results from theoretical analyses and agent-based simulations suggest that evolutionary dynamics need not yield homogeneous populations, but can instead generate a polymorphic population that consists of individuals who vary in their degree of cooperativeness. These results resonate with the recent increasing emphasis on the importance of individual differences in understanding and modeling behavior and dynamics in experimental games and decision problems. Here, we report the results of laboratory experiments that complement both theory and simulation results. We find that our subjects fall into three types, an individual's type is stable, and a group's cooperative outcomes can be remarkably well predicted if one knows its type composition. Reciprocal types, who contribute to the public good as a positive function of their beliefs about others' contributions, constitute the majority (63%) of players; cooperators and free-riders are also present in our subject population. Despite substantial behavioral differences, earnings among types are statistically identical. Our results support the view that our human subject population is in a stable, polymorphic equilibrium of types.behavioral economics ͉ cooperation ͉ evolution ͉ public goods

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 65%

Experiments investigating cooperative types in humans: A complement to evolutionary theory and simulations

Kurzban

Houser

2005

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

Self Cite

355

265

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“…they cooperate more when they perceive that co-players are more willing to cooperate Dawes, 1991, 1993;Ledyard, 1995;Fischbacher et al, 2001;Lubell and Scholz, 2001), and less when they believe that co-players are free riding (Fehr and Gächter, 2000;Kurzban et al, 2001a).…”

Section: Opening Cooperative Moves and Subsequent Monitoring Forms Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More seriously, sufficient penetration by free riding can trigger the termination of an otherwise mutually beneficial ongoing intercontingent effort. Consequently, unless maintained by corrective social feedback, cheating or undercontribution will spread contagiously, and contributions to joint efforts will ratchet downwards (Kurzban et al, 2001a). When opportunities for monitoring and feedback are inadequate, effort minimization tends to operate unopposed, and the cooperative network erodes away.…”

Section: Opening Cooperative Moves and Subsequent Monitoring Forms Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive adaptations for n‐person exchange: the evolutionary roots of organizational behavior

2006

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Organizations are composed of stable, predominantly cooperative interactions or n-person exchanges. Humans have been engaging in n-person exchanges for a great enough period of evolutionary time that we appear to have evolved a distinct constellation of species-typical mechanisms specialized to solve the adaptive problems posed by this form of social interaction. These mechanisms appear to have been evolutionarily elaborated out of the cognitive infrastructure that initially evolved for dyadic exchange. Key adaptive problems that these mechanisms are designed to solve include coordination among individuals, and defense against exploitation by free riders. Multi-individual cooperation could not have been maintained over evolutionary time if free riders reliably benefited more than contributors to collective enterprises, and so outcompeted them. As a result, humans evolved mechanisms that implement an aversion to exploitation by free riding, and a strategy of conditional cooperation, supplemented by punitive sentiment towards free riders. Because of the design of these mechanisms, how free riding is treated is a central determinant of the survival and health of cooperative organizations. The mapping of the evolved psychology of n-party exchange cooperation may contribute to the construction of a principled theoretical foundation for the understanding of human behavior in organizations.

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“…Our results should therefore help us to understand the development of cooperative relationships. They may also be compared with analogous results from studies of contributions to public goods, where it has been suggested that incremental strategies of commitment may increase the production of public goods in later rounds (Kurzban et al 2001). The prediction that reciprocal relationships will develop from small beginnings is also consistent with the observation of Axelrod (1984) that in the 'live-and-let-live' system of trench warfare 'restraint undertaken in certain hours could be extended to longer hours'.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

The development of cooperative relationships: an experiment

Roberts

Renwick

2003

Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B

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Pairs of individuals frequently face situations in which they could do well if they cooperated, but each risks being exploited. The Prisoner's Dilemma is widely used for investigating such scenarios, but it is framed in terms of cooperating and defecting, whereas in reality cooperation is rarely 'all or nothing'. Recent models allowing for variable investment in cooperation indicated the success of a strategy of 'raising-the-stakes' (RTS), which invests minimally at first and then increases its investment if its partner matches it. We tested whether this strategy was adopted by subjects participating in an experiment in which they could choose how much money to give to a partner, reciprocity being encouraged by doubling donations. Subjects did increase their donations over successive rounds, both when playing against a stooge who reciprocated with the same investment, and when playing with a partner who was free to choose their investment. Subjects showed a strong tendency to match variations in their partner's investments. Cooperation was therefore achieved through a combination of initial escalation (RTS strategy) and quantitative responsiveness ('give-as-good-as-you-get' strategy). Although initial offers were higher than predicted, our results were broadly consistent with theoretical expectations.

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Incremental Commitment and Reciprocity in a Real-Time Public Goods Game

Cited by 138 publications

References 46 publications

Experiments investigating cooperative types in humans: A complement to evolutionary theory and simulations

Experiments investigating cooperative types in humans: A complement to evolutionary theory and simulations

Cognitive adaptations for n‐person exchange: the evolutionary roots of organizational behavior

The development of cooperative relationships: an experiment

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