Abstract
This paper compares cooperation among Columbian and Swedish children aged 9-12. We illustrate the dynamics of the prisoner’s dilemma in a new task that is easily understood by children and performed during a physical education class. We find some evidence that children cooperate more in Sweden than in Colombia. Girls in Colombia are less cooperative than boys, whereas our results indicate the opposite gender gap in Sweden. On average, children are more cooperative with boys than with girls.
Highlights
The possibility to overcome socially inefficient economic outcomes through cooperation plays an important role in many everyday situations such as those concerning the provision of public goods, or the use of common-pool resources
In this article we report on gender differences in cooperation among more than 800 children aged 9–12 years in Colombia and Sweden, two countries with clear differences regarding gender equality of opportunities and outcomes [20]
Even though there are ten allocation decisions, the children receive no feedback during the placement of the balls and the ten allocation decisions are combined into a single measure of cooperation which is the number of balls placed in the public bin
Summary
The possibility to overcome socially inefficient economic outcomes through cooperation plays an important role in many everyday situations such as those concerning the provision of public goods, or the use of common-pool resources. We introduce a novel version of a prisoner’s dilemma that can be implemented in a Physical Education (PE) class. In this task, children are randomly paired, and decide in private how to divide a total of 10 balls between a private bin that gives three individual points for each ball and a public bin that gives two points per ball to each child. The children are given two minutes to fetch the balls one by one and make their decisions on how to allocate the balls This one-shot two player-game can be considered as a continuous prisoner’s dilemma or a twoperson public goods game. Even though there are ten allocation decisions, the children receive no feedback during the placement of the balls and the ten allocation decisions are combined into a single measure of cooperation which is the number of balls placed in the public bin
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