Cooperation and Coordination in Cultures with Age-Based Social Hierarchies

Hierarchy plays an integral role in organizational structure and practices, as well as in society more generally. In Confucian-influenced cultures, and especially in South Korea, social hierarchies are often based on age, and age dynamics can therefore influence social decision-making and organizational practices. In one-shot anonymous Stag Hunt and Prisoner’s Dilemma games, we find that providing age information significantly increased coordination and cooperation in a Korean participant pool, primarily by influencing preferences for fairness and reciprocity. This does not necessarily imply that hierarchies are desirable, since they may also yield other (negative) consequences; however, these results emphasize the importance of considering age hierarchies when modeling Korean social preferences, norms, and organizational practices. Specific to managerial implications, our results emphasize that determinants of formal and informal hierarchy (and thus focal points for coordination and cooperation among workers) can vary across cultures. As a counterfactual, we find that providing age information to a US participant pool yielded 0% effects. Baseline cooperation rates without age information were also higher in the US than in Korea, but this difference disappeared in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (and was halved in the Stag Hunt) once age information was provided. This last result emphasizes that in cross-cultural experiments, using the same experimental protocols in each culture is not always sufficient for externally valid comparisons. Simply put, the protocol may lack key focal points or trait information (such as age) that one of the two cultures is accustomed to relying on for social choice