La rationalité des agents économiques va-t-elle toujours à l'encontre de la coopération ?. Le jeu de la poule mouillée

This paper interests itself in a ?game of chicken? involving heterogeneous players. More precisely, it examines the conditions for the initiation and engagement of cooperative agreements between two types of economic agents: (i) those with a standard rationality (maximization of own payoffs); and (ii) those with a preference for cooperative behaviour (after contract initiation). Each agent knows his own ?type? but is ignorant of the ?type? of his partner in the game. However the proportion of the two types of players in the population is common knowledge. This analysis concerns a non-repeated game under incomplete information without the possibility of eliminating opportunism through contracts. We show that higher the proportion of ?rational? individuals in the population, higher the incentives for these players to cooperate. A minimum of ?rational? agents is necessary to induce cooperation from this population group. The degree of cooperation in the entire population is however independent of the initial proportion of ?rational? agents being dictated by the payoff configurations.