Social preferences under the shadow of the future

Felix Kölle, Simone Quercia, Egon Tripodi

Social interactions predominantly take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature explains cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma as predominantly driven by self-interested strategic considerations. This paper provides a causal test of the importance of social preferences for cooperation, varying the composition of interactions to be either homogeneous or heterogeneous in terms of these preferences. Through a series of pre-registered experiments (N = 1,074), we show that groups of prosocial individuals achieve substantially higher levels of cooperation. The cooperation gap between prosocial and selfish groups persists even when the shadow of the future is increased to make cooperation attractive for the selfish and when common knowledge about group composition is removed.

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Year of publication:	June 2023
Authors:	Kölle, Felix ; Quercia, Simone ; Tripodi, Egon
Publisher:	Munich, Germany : CESifo
Subject:	cooperation \| indefinitely repeated games \| prisoner’s dilemma \| social preferences \| experiment \| Soziale Wohlfahrtsfunktion \| Social welfare function \| Gefangenendilemma \| Prisoner's dilemma \| Experiment \| Spieltheorie \| Game theory \| Kooperation \| Cooperation \| Wiederholte Spiele \| Repeated games \| Kooperatives Spiel \| Cooperative game