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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Choice Flexibility And Long-Run Cooperation, Gabriele Camera, Jaehong Kim, David Rojo Arjona
Choice Flexibility And Long-Run Cooperation, Gabriele Camera, Jaehong Kim, David Rojo Arjona
ESI Working Papers
Understanding how incentives and institutions help scaling up cooperation is important, especially when strategic uncertainty is considerable. Evidence suggests that this is challenging even when full cooperation is theoretically sustainable thanks to indefinite repetition. In a controlled social dilemma experiment, we show that adding partial cooperation choices to the usual binary choice environment can raise cooperation and efficiency. Under suitable incentives, partial cooperation choices enable individuals to cheaply signal their desire to cooperate, reducing strategic uncertainty. The insight is that richer choice sets can form the basis of a language meaningful for coordinating on cooperation.
God Games: An Experimental Study Of Uncertainty, Superstition, And Cooperation, Aidin Hajikhameneh, Laurence R. Iannaccone
God Games: An Experimental Study Of Uncertainty, Superstition, And Cooperation, Aidin Hajikhameneh, Laurence R. Iannaccone
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
This paper uses a novel lab experiment to test claims about the origins and functions of religion. We modify the standard public goods game, adding a computer-based agent that adjusts earnings in ways that might depend on players' contributions. Our treatments employ three different descriptions of the adjustment process that loosely correspond to monotheistic, atheistic, and agnostic interpretations of the computer's role. The adjustments neither mask players' contributions nor magnify their impact. Yet players in all three adjustment treatments contribute much more than those who play the standard public goods game. Players' contributions and survey responses show that adjustments induce …