Community Size Reduces the Relative Advantage of Partnersover Strangers in a Sharing Dilemma

The transmission of innovations and ideas within and between organizations is key to the development and growth of modern economies. Yet, the act of sharing profitable new knowledge is often not in the interest of the innovator; depending on the institutional arrangement or the type of the good, s/he may not be able to fully appropriate the returns from the innovation effort. This can lead to sub-optimal supply of knowledge similarly to a collective action problem.Companies and policy-makers often seek to foster knowledge-sharing by favoring the emergence of reciprocal relations (e.g., regional clusters, hubs). Yet, behavioural research on the relationship between knowledge-sharing and network structures is scarce. In this work, we recreate the tension between cooperative and competitive forces in an incentivized experiment.By wiring subjects into networks and manipulating two important dimensions regulating sharing interactions, i.e., the possibility of repeated encounters and the number of connected counterparts, we measure people's propensity to share beneficial discoveries with competitors. We find that repeated interactions characterizing stable networks can favour the sharing of knowledge but only when connectivity is low