Abstract
The Centipede game provides a dynamic model of cooperation and competition in repeated dyadic interactions. Two experiments investigated psychological factors driving cooperation in 20 rounds of a Centipede game with significant monetary incentives and anonymous and random re-pairing of players after every round. The main purpose of the research was to determine whether the pattern of strategic choices observed when no specific social value orientation is experimentally induced—the standard condition in all previous investigations of behavior in the Centipede and most other experimental games—is essentially individualistic, the orthodox game-theoretic assumption being that players are individualistically motivated in the absence of any specific motivational induction. Participants in whom no specific state social value orientation was induced exhibited moderately non-cooperative play that differed significantly from the pattern found when an individualistic orientation was induced. In both experiments, the neutral treatment condition, in which no orientation was induced, elicited competitive behavior resembling behavior in the condition in which a competitive orientation was explicitly induced. Trait social value orientation, measured with a questionnaire, influenced cooperation differently depending on the experimentally induced state social value orientation. Cooperative trait social value orientation was a significant predictor of cooperation and, to a lesser degree, experimentally induced competitive orientation was a significant predictor of non-cooperation. The experimental results imply that the standard assumption of individualistic motivation in experimental games may not be valid, and that the results of such investigations need to take into account the possibility that players are competitively motivated.
Highlights
Cooperation and competition are the most quintessentially social forms of human behavior; it is difficult to think of any significant class of social interactions that does not involve cooperation or competition in some form
Very few games ended with a player exiting at the first decision node (1.17% of games played across all treatment conditions), and very few continued beyond the eighth decision node (2.00% across all treatment conditions)
Choices in the cooperative condition were significantly more cooperative than those in the competitive condition, and choices in the competitive condition were significantly more cooperative than those in the neutral condition. This shows that cooperation was highly responsive to the very small nudges in the instructions that were used to induce state social value orientations in the cooperative and competitive treatment conditions
Summary
Cooperation and competition are the most quintessentially social forms of human behavior; it is difficult to think of any significant class of social interactions that does not involve cooperation or competition in some form. The Centipede game provides a model of everyday relationships involving dynamic sequences of reciprocal cooperation between people who have full knowledge of each other’s actions. Opportunities for such reciprocity arise frequently in everyday life, as when academics take turns providing feedback on each other’s manuscripts and grant applications. The game was introduced by Rosenthal [1] and named by Binmore [2] after the resemblance of its game tree to a creature with many legs (see Fig 1) It is a dynamic game in which players move sequentially rather than simultaneously, in full knowledge of all previous moves that have been made. The Prisoner’s Dilemma game cannot model such relationships, because it is a static game in which each player has only one move, the players move simultaneously rather than sequentially, and each player has to choose a move without knowing what the other player has chosen—features that are absent from the relationships of reciprocal cooperation that we are considering in this article
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