Slow to Anger and Fast to Forgive: Cooperation in an Uncertain World

Drew Fudenberg · David Gertler Rand · Anna Dreber

95 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Economic Review

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Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies Game Theory and Applications Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation

Abstract

We study the experimental play of the repeated prisoner's dilemma when intended actions are implemented with noise. In treatments where cooperation is an equilibrium, subjects cooperate substantially more than in treatments without cooperative equilibria. In all settings there was considerable strategic diversity, indicating that subjects had not fully learned the distribution of play. Furthermore, cooperative strategies yielded higher payoffs than uncooperative strategies in the treatments with cooperative equilibria. In these treatments successful strategies were “lenient” in not retaliating for the first defection, and many were “forgiving” in trying to return to cooperation after inflicting a punishment. (JEL C72, C73, D81)

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References

1981The Evolution of Cooperation 1999A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation 2007z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments 1986The Folk Theorem in Repeated Games with Discounting or with Incomplete Information 1984Noncooperative Collusion under Imperfect Price Information 1971A Non-cooperative Equilibrium for Supergames 1990Toward a Theory of Discounted Repeated Games with Imperfect Monitoring 1994The Folk Theorem with Imperfect Public Information

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