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Team reasoning-Experimental evidence on cooperation from centipede games.

ABSTRACT: Previous laboratory studies on the centipede game have found that subjects exhibit surprisingly high levels of cooperation. Across disciplines, it has recently been highlighted that these high levels of cooperation might be explained by "team reasoning", the willingness to think as a team rather than as an individual. We run an experiment with a standard centipede game as a baseline. In two treatments, we seek to induce team reasoning by making a joint goal salient. First, we implement a probabilistic variant of the centipede game that makes it easy to identify a joint goal. Second, we frame the game as a situation where a team of two soccer players attempts to score a goal. This frame increases the salience even more. Compared to the baseline, our treatments induce higher levels of cooperation. In a second experiment, we obtain similar evidence in a more natural environment-a beer garden during the 2014 FIFA Soccer World Cup. Our study contributes to understanding how a salient goal can support cooperation.

SUBMITTER: Graf Lambsdorff J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6261539 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Team reasoning-Experimental evidence on cooperation from centipede games.

Graf Lambsdorff Johann J Giamattei Marcus M Werner Katharina K Schubert Manuel M

PloS one 20181128 11

Previous laboratory studies on the centipede game have found that subjects exhibit surprisingly high levels of cooperation. Across disciplines, it has recently been highlighted that these high levels of cooperation might be explained by "team reasoning", the willingness to think as a team rather than as an individual. We run an experiment with a standard centipede game as a baseline. In two treatments, we seek to induce team reasoning by making a joint goal salient. First, we implement a probabi ...[more]

PMID: 30485306

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Project description:This paper investigates cooperation games in which poor agents do not benefit from cooperation with wealthy agents. They instead benefit from considering wealth relative to decision payoffs of fitness or wealth. Of concern is the effect of cooperation on participants, their rational self-interest and choices, and not the evolution of cooperation directly. The accumulation of fitness or wealth has been shown in the literature to lead to different optimal strategies for wealthy and poor players in Chicken games. The effect could have important explanatory power if it were more broadly applicable. First we empirically compare two published results, one involving the temptation parameter vs. degree of cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma, and the other a surprising result from a public goods game with participants from different cultures, networks and wealth in which a fixed rather than relative payoff scheme was used. Using the temptation data to calibrate the public goods behavior suggests wealth factors can provide an explanation for the results. Second we show using simulation that adding a survival threshold to a wealth or fitness accumulating Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma produces a wealth relative effect. We clarify previous results to show the poor must avoid survival risk, regardless of whether this is associated with cooperation or defection. We do this by introducing the Farmer's Game, a simulation of Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with wealth accumulation and a survival threshold. This is used to evaluate the Tit-for-Tat strategy and four variants. Equilibrium payoffs keep the game scaled to social relevance, with a fraction of all payoffs externalized as a turn cost parameter. Findings include poor performance of Tit-for-Tat near the survival threshold, superior performance of low risk strategies for both poor and wealthy players, dependence of survival of the poor near the threshold on Tit-for-Tat forgiveness, unexpected optimization of forgiveness without encountering a social dilemma, improved performance of a diverse mix of strategies, and a more abrupt threshold of social catastrophe for the better performing mix. Lastly we compare cooperating and non-cooperating societies using the simulation and discover disturbing connections between cooperation and familiar non-egalitarian wealth distribution patterns.

Dataset Information

Team reasoning-Experimental evidence on cooperation from centipede games.

Publications

Team reasoning-Experimental evidence on cooperation from centipede games.

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