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 embedding the reciprocal strategy as an institution (i.e., institutionalizing the reciprocal strategy). We experimentally demonstrate that IR can prevent groups of reciprocators from falling into coordination failure and achieve high cooperation in PG games. In conclusion, we argue that a natural extension of the present study will be to investigate the possibility of IR to serve as a collective punishment system.
Highlights
Cooperation is fundamental to human societies, and one of the important paths for its emergence and maintenance is reciprocity: responding to kindness with kindness and to unkindness with unkindness (e.g., [1,2,3])
As one of the purposes of the present study is to propose a feasible mechanism that enables people to cooperate in public goods (PG) games, it is worth examining whether institutionalized reciprocity (IR) can work under a more general condition, where players can contribute without constraint in each period
These results are consistent with Hypotheses 1(a) and 1(b), which imply that S-IR, but not NL-IR and cooperation than the typical PG game (CON), has the power to uphold cooperation in PG games
Summary
Cooperation is fundamental to human societies, and one of the important paths for its emergence and maintenance is reciprocity: responding to kindness with kindness and to unkindness with unkindness (e.g., [1,2,3]). In PD experiments, reciprocal strategies such as tit for tat (TFT) ([4]) and raise the stakes (RTS) ([5]) are often effective at attaining high cooperation (e.g., [6,7,8,9,10]). In the RTS strategy, a player raises the stake (contribution) when mutual cooperation is achieved in the previous period and reduces it to a level equal to the other player’s contribution in the previous period when the other player’s contribution is lower than his or hers in the previous period. Since the 1980s, finitely repeated game theories have shown how a finite number of repetitions might allow cooperation (e.g., [11,12]). They show that if there are sufficient
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