Institutionalize Reciprocity to Overcome the Public Goods Provision Problem.

ABSTRACT: Cooperation is fundamental to human societies, and one of the important paths for its emergence and maintenance is reciprocity. In prisoner's dilemma (PD) experiments, reciprocal strategies are often effective at attaining and maintaining high cooperation. In many public goods (PG) games or n-person PD experiments, however, reciprocal strategies are not successful at engendering cooperation. In the present paper, we attribute this difficulty to a coordination problem against free riding among reciprocators: Because it is difficult for the reciprocators to coordinate their behaviors against free riders, this may lead to inequality among players, which will demotivate them from cooperating in future rounds. We propose a new mechanism, institutionalized reciprocity (IR), which refers to embed

SUBMITTER: Ozono H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4889071 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature