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 experimentally examine how the incentive to defect in a social dilemma affects conditional cooperation. In our first study we conduct online experiments in which subjects play eight Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma games with payoffs systematically varied across games. We find that few second...

We investigate whether there is a link between conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion. We use a public goods game to classify subjects by type of contribution preference and by belief about the contributions of others; and we measure betrayal aversion for different categories of subject....