scholarly journals Conditional Cooperation and the Marginal per Capita Return in Public Good Games

Games ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 234-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Cartwright ◽  
Denise Lovett
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 191567
Author(s):  
Balaraju Battu ◽  
Narayanan Srinivasan

Cooperation declines in repeated public good games because individuals behave as conditional cooperators. This is because individuals imitate the social behaviour of successful individuals when their payoff information is available. However, in human societies, individuals cooperate in many situations involving social dilemmas. We hypothesize that humans are sensitive to both success (payoffs) and how that success was obtained, by cheating (not socially sanctioned) or good behaviour (socially sanctioned and adds to prestige or reputation), when information is available about payoffs and prestige. We propose and model a repeated public good game with heterogeneous conditional cooperators where an agent's donation in a public goods game depends on comparing the number of donations in the population in the previous round and with the agent's arbitrary chosen conditional cooperative criterion. Such individuals imitate the social behaviour of role models based on their payoffs and prestige. The dependence is modelled by two population-level parameters: affinity towards payoff and affinity towards prestige . These affinities influence the degree to which agents value the payoff and prestige of role models. Agents update their conditional strategies by considering both parameters. The simulations in this study show that high levels of cooperation are established in a population consisting of heterogeneous conditional cooperators for a certain range of affinity parameters in repeated public good games. The results show that social value (prestige) is important in establishing cooperation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (5) ◽  
pp. 1291-1296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell N. Burton-Chellew ◽  
Claire El Mouden ◽  
Stuart A. West

Economic experiments are often used to study if humans altruistically value the welfare of others. A canonical result from public-good games is that humans vary in how they value the welfare of others, dividing into fair-minded conditional cooperators, who match the cooperation of others, and selfish noncooperators. However, an alternative explanation for the data are that individuals vary in their understanding of how to maximize income, with misunderstanding leading to the appearance of cooperation. We show that (i) individuals divide into the same behavioral types when playing with computers, whom they cannot be concerned with the welfare of; (ii) behavior across games with computers and humans is correlated and can be explained by variation in understanding of how to maximize income; (iii) misunderstanding correlates with higher levels of cooperation; and (iv) standard control questions do not guarantee understanding. These results cast doubt on certain experimental methods and demonstrate that a common assumption in behavioral economics experiments, that choices reveal motivations, will not necessarily hold.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 261-299
Author(s):  
Florian Engl ◽  
Arno Riedl ◽  
Roberto Weber

Most institutions are limited in scope. We study experimentally how enforcement institutions affect behavior, preferences, and beliefs beyond their direct influence over the behaviors they control. Groups play two identical public good games, with cooperation institutionally enforced in one game. Institutions generally have economically significant positive spillover effects to the unregulated game. We also observe that institutions enhance conditional cooperation preferences and beliefs about others’ cooperativeness, suggesting that both factors are drivers of observed spillover effects. In additional treatments, we provide evidence for several factors, including characteristics of institutions, that enhance or limit the effectiveness and scope of spillover effects. (JEL C92, D02, D83, D91, H41)


Author(s):  
Cesar Mantilla ◽  
Rajiv Sethi ◽  
Juan-Camilo CCrdenas

Games ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Rocio Botta ◽  
Gerardo Blanco ◽  
Christian E. Schaerer

Improving and maintaining cooperation are fundamental issues for any project to be time-persistent, and sanctioning free riders may be the most applied method to achieve it. However, the application of sanctions differs from one group (project or institution) to another. We propose an optional, public good game model where a randomly selected set of the free riders is punished. To this end, we introduce a parameter that establishes the portion of free riders sanctioned with the purpose to control the population state evolution in the game. This parameter modifies the phase portrait of the system, and we show that, when the parameter surpasses a threshold, the full cooperation equilibrium point becomes a stable global attractor. Hence, we demonstrate that the fractional approach improves cooperation while reducing the sanctioning cost.


2018 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 185-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timo Goeschl ◽  
Johannes Lohse

2009 ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Riccardo Boero

- The author presents a formal model of cooperative dynamics in a local development system, with a specific focus on the evaluation of institutional interventions undertaken by stakeholders aiming at supporting cooperation.Keywords: agent-based social simulation, Slowfood presidia, voluntary public good provision, conditional cooperation, rural local development systems


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