Experiment participants in a social dilemma game choose cooperation over defection, even though neither is more beneficial. High levels of cooperation cannot be explained by favorable labels for actions, collusion, k-level reasoning, quantal response behavior, or misplaced optimism about others'...

Gallice and Monzón (2019) present a natural environment that sustains full cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of self-interested agents. They demonstrate that in a sequential public goods game, where agents lack knowledge of their position in the sequence but can...

The well-known prisoner's dilemma shows why cooperation may be difficult to achieve even when cooperation would create value for all partners. In particular, material interests conflict because reciprocity cannot be enforced, while agents give priority to their material self-interest. This paper...

Interrelated global crises - climate change, pandemics, loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity - pose risks that demand collective solutions. Uncertainty about others' behavior, coupled with the dependence on some to take collective efforts to mitigate risks for all (e.g. conservation of...

Living organisms expend energy to sustain survival, a process which is reliant on consuming resources - termed here as the "cost of survival". In the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD), a classic model of social interaction, individual payoffs depend on choices to either provide benefits to others at a...

We characterize 'Games of Altruistic Cooperation' as a class of games in which cooperation leaves the individual and the group of decision-makers worse off than defection, but favors individuals outside the group. An example is climate change mitigation. In this context, we experimentally...

Human cooperation is ubiquitous and instinctive. We are among the most cooperative species on Earth. Still, research mostly focuses on why we cooperate, instead of understanding why some of us do not do so. The public goods game can be used to map human cooperation as well as to study free...

This paper studies how competition between groups affects cooperation. In the control condition, pairs of subjects play an indefinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game without external competition. In the treatment, two pairs compete against each other. No monetary rewards are tied to winning,...

We analyze infinitely repeated multiplayer prisoner's dilemmas in continuous-time experiments. As the number of players changes, our design keeps the payoffs of the all-defection, all-cooperation, and unilateral- defection and -cooperation outcomes constant, thus controlling for the minimum...

In diesem Korreferat zu dem Beitrag 'Ökonomische Bildung in der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft' von Nils Goldschmidt und Marco Rehm werden zuerst die Hauptpunkte ihrer Argumentation herausgestellt und danach kritisch betrachtet. Die Ordonomik von Ingo Pies erscheint zu eng und kontrovers für...

We consider the repeated prisoner's dilemma with implementation errors, and look at the resulting population dynamics, both analytically and with simulations. We show that with implementation errors, pure equilibrium strategies represented by finite state automata exhibit a structure that we...

Do large language models (LLMs) - such as ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4.0, and Google's Gemini 1.0 Pro - simulate human behavior in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game with varying stake sizes? This paper investigates this question, examining how LLMs navigate scenarios where...

The prisoner's dilemma (PD) is arguably the most important model of social dilemmas, but our knowledge about how a PD's material payoff structure affects cooperation is incomplete. In this paper we investigate the effect of variation in material payoffs on cooperation, focusing on one-shot PD...

We consider the repeated prisoner's dilemma with implementation errors, and look at the resulting population dynamics, both analytically and with simulations. We show that with implementation errors, pure equilibrium strategies represented by finite state automata exhibit a structure that we...

We experimentally examine how incentives affect conditional cooperation (i.e., cooperating in response to cooperation and defecting in response to defection) in social dilemmas. In our first study, subjects play eight Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma games with varying payoffs. We elicit second...

We study the developmental roots of cooperation in 929 young children, aged 3 to 6. In a unified experimental framework, we examine pre-registered hypotheses about which of three fundamental pillars of human cooperation - direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and third-party punishment -...