Risk, temptation, and efficiency in prisoner's dilemmas

Arbeitspapier

We examine the effect of payoff variations on cooperation in one-shot prisoner's dilemma games. We focus on three factors: risk, temptation, and efficiency, which we vary as orthogonal treatments. We find that temptation has the largest impact on cooperation. Temptation directly deters cooperation and indirectly harms cooperation by lowering beliefs about the opponent's cooperativeness. Efficiency indirectly affects cooperation through beliefs, but the magnitude of the effect is relatively small compared to temptation. Risk does not have a significant effect on cooperation. Our finding suggests that curbing the level of temptation is the most important way to improve cooperation in social dilemmas.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: CeDEx Discussion Paper Series ; No. 2020-15

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Relation of Economics to Social Values ; Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Individual
• Subject: prisoner's dilemma ; cooperation ; temptation ; efficiency ; risk

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Gächter, Simon ; Lee, Kyeongtae ; Sefton, Martin
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): The University of Nottingham, Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx)
• (where): Nottingham
• (when): 2020

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/228380
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET