Conditional Cooperation Research Articles

Cooperation in a sequential dilemma game: How much transparency is good for cooperation?

Is cooperation in a sequential social dilemma more likely if players know when it is their turn in the sequence and what others have done before them? Is such transparency beneficial for cooperation? Having no information or having full information on the order of move and on what others have done before in the sequential game leads to the same theoretical prediction: free-riding. However, Nishihara (Nishihara, 1997) proved that full cooperation can be sustained in a class of social dilemma games in a Nash equilibrium if players have partial information. This is the case when they do not know the order of their move in the game and only observe whether or not someone chose to free-ride before them. In an experiment, we implement a game satisfying these conditions. We compare behavior in this game to the same game, but with subjects informed on the order in which they move. Cooperation is not an equilibrium in this case, but we find that cooperation is more frequent in this treatment than in the partial information treatment where cooperation is an equilibrium outcome. We relate our observations to conditional cooperation motivations.

Problems of formation of effective cooperative legislation at the present stage of agro-industrial complex development

The article is devoted to the issues of formation of the cooperative legislation, adequate to the essential foundations of cooperation and its at the present stage of development of the domestic agro-industrial complex. It is established that the existing system of "multilaterality", under which the activities of various types of cooperatives in rural areas are regulated by separate regulatory legal acts, does not allow to clearly identify the cooperative as a form of management, which puts co-operation in unequal conditions with other organizational and legal forms. Examples of the inconsistency of certain provisions of the current cooperative legislation with each other and the principles of cooperation are given. It is made a conclusion on the current tendency of its development towards the equalization of agricultural cooperatives with commercial forms of management. One of the criteria for assessing cooperative legislation is the compliance of its provisions with cooperative principles and values proclaimed by the International Cooperative Alliance, as well as the established practice of cooperative relations. In order to improve co-operative legislation it is necessary to adopt a federal framework law on cooperation, in which essential features and principles of activity common for all types and forms of cooperatives should be set out. They should emphasize the non-commercial nature of the activities of these organizations, as well as abolish a number of existing legal norms that contradict the essential fundamentals cooperation.

The power of joint decision-making in a finitely-repeated dilemma

A rich body of literature has proposed that pairs behave significantly differently from individuals due to a number of reasons such as group polarization. This paper experimentally compares cooperation behaviors between pairs and individuals in a finitely-repeated two-player public goods game (continuous prisoner’s dilemma game). We show that pairs contribute significantly more than individuals to their group accounts. Especially, when two pairs are matched with each other for the entire periods, they successfully build long-lasting cooperative relationships with their matched pairs. Our detailed analyses suggest that the enhanced cooperation behavior of pairs may be driven by (a) the mere fact that they have partners when they make decisions, (b) group polarization – those who initially prefer to contribute smaller amounts are more affected by the partners in their pairs, and (c) stronger conditional cooperation behavior of pairs to their matched pairs.

When the Relatively Poor Prosper: The Underdog Effect on Charitable Donations

In fundraising, it is common for the donor to see how much a charity has received so far. What is the impact of this information on (a) how much people choose to donate and (b) which charity they choose to donate to? Conditional cooperation suggests that people will donate to the charity that has received the most prior support, while the Underdog Effect suggests increased donations to the charity with the least support. Across two laboratory experiments, an online study (combined N = 494) and a qualitative survey ( N = 60), a consistent preference to donate to the charity with the least prior support was observed. Thus, the Underdog Effect was supported. We suggest people will show a preference for the underdog if there are two or more charities to donate to, one of the charities is at a disadvantage, and people have little preexisting loyalty to either charity.

Sustaining cooperation through self-sorting: The good, the bad, and the conditional

In four public-good game experiments, we study self-sorting as a means to facilitate cooperation in groups. When individuals can choose to join groups precommitted to charity, such groups sustain cooperation toward the group’s local public good. By eliciting subjects’ conditional contribution profiles, we find that subjects who prefer the charity groups have higher average conditional contribution levels but do not differ with respect to the slope of their profiles. The majority of subjects in both group types are conditional cooperators whose willingness to contribute is stimulated by generous group members but undermined by free-riders. Charity groups thus seem better able to sustain cooperation because they attract a greater number of more generous individuals, triggering generous responses by conditional cooperators.

Contributions in linear public goods experiments with stranger matching: two motivations

ABSTRACTWe investigated why subjects contribute to the public good in a linear public goods game with stranger matching. In this experiment, subjects were asked to determine their contributions to the public good and also their beliefs about their partners’ contributions. Additionally, the subjects were asked to note the reason for their decisions in real time. We used the subjects’ descriptions for a coding analysis, which is a classification method of the motivations. Integrating this coding methodology and behavioural data revealed that full contributions are the result of two motives. One is the conditional cooperation motive to achieve the socially optimal outcome. The other is the motive to lead the other group member to contribute all of their endowment in the following periods by signalling one’s own act (i.e. a teaching motive). The study further reveals that the two identified motives play a key role in driving cooperative behaviour, and that other motives (such as confusion and altruism) play a minor role.

Conditional cooperation: Review and refinement

Fischbacher et al. (2001), henceforth FGF, introduced an experimental design to measure conditional cooperation in public goods games. We collected data from 17 replication studies of FGF and observed that the criteria used to identify types are not always consistent. We refine FGF’s definition of types to resolve ambiguous cases in FGF and its replications. Using our new classification scheme, we find in our combined data set with more than 7000 individual observations that FGF’s original findings are by-and-large stable: conditional cooperation is the predominant pattern; free-riding is frequent, while non-minimal, unconditional cooperation is very rare.

Cooperation and norm enforcement - The individual-level perspective

We explore the relationship between individuals' disposition to cooperate and their inclination to engage in peer punishment as well as their relative importance for mitigating social dilemmas. Using a modified strategy-method approach we identify individual punishment patterns and link them with individual cooperation patterns. Classifying N = 628 subjects along these two dimensions documents that cooperation and punishment patterns are aligned for most individuals. However, the data also reveal a sizable share of free-riders that punish pro-socially and conditional cooperators that do not engage in punishment. Analyzing the interplay between types in an additional experiment, we show that pro-social punishers are important for achieving cooperation. Incorporating information on punishment types explains large amounts of the between- and within-group variation in cooperation.

Maximizing Growth Yield and Dispersal via Quorum Sensing Promotes Cooperation in Vibrio Bacteria.

Quorum sensing (QS) is a form of bacterial chemical communication that regulates cellular phenotypes, including certain cooperative behaviors, in response to environmental and demographic changes. Despite the existence of proposed mechanisms that stabilize QS against defector exploitation, it is unclear if or how QS cooperators can proliferate in some model systems in populations mostly consisting of defectors. We predicted that growth in fragmented subpopulations could allow QS cooperators to invade a QS defector population. This could occur despite cooperators having lower relative fitnesses than defectors due to favored weighting of genotypes that produce larger populations of bacteria. Mixed metapopulations of Vibrio QS-proficient or unconditional cooperators and QS defectors were diluted and fragmented into isolated subpopulations in an environment that requires QS-regulated public good production to achieve larger population yields. Under these conditions, we observed global invasions of both cooperator genotypes into populations composed of primarily defectors. This spatially dependent increase in cooperator frequency was replicated for QS cooperators when mixed populations were competed in soft agar motility plates under conditions that allowed cooperators to disperse and outcompete defectors at the population edge, despite being less motile in isolation than defectors. These competition results show that the coordinated growth and dispersal of QS cooperators to additional resources is heavily favored in comparison to unconditional cooperation, and that dispersal of cooperators by motility into new environments, examined here in laboratory populations, constitutes a key mechanism for maintaining QS-regulated cooperation in the face of defection.IMPORTANCE Behaviors that are cooperative in nature are at risk of exploitation by cheating and are thus difficult to maintain by natural selection alone. While bacterial cell-cell communication, known as quorum sensing (QS), can stabilize microbial cooperative behaviors and is widespread in Vibrio species, it is unclear how QS can increase the frequency of cooperative strains in the presence of defectors without additional mechanisms. In this study, we demonstrate under multiple conditions that QS-mediated cooperation can increase in populations of Vibrio strains when cells experience narrow population bottlenecks or disperse from defectors. This occurred for both conditional cooperation mediated by QS and for unconditional cooperation, although conditional cooperators were better able to stabilize cooperation over a much wider range of conditions. Thus, we observed that population structuring allowed for assortment of competing genotypes and promoted cooperation via kin selection in microbes in a QS-dependent manner.

Normative foundations of human cooperation.

A large literature shares the view that social norms shape human cooperation, but without a clean empirical identification of the relevant norms almost every behaviour can be rationalized as norm driven, thus rendering norms useless as an explanatory construct. This raises the question of whether social norms are indeed causal drivers of behaviour and can convincingly explain major cooperation-related regularities. Here, we show that the norm of conditional cooperation provides such an explanation, that powerful methods for its empirical identification exist and that social norms have causal effects. Norm compliance rests on fundamental human motives ('social preferences') that also imply a willingness to punish free-riders, but normative constraints on peer punishment are important for its effectiveness and welfare properties. If given the chance, a large majority of people favour the imposition of such constraints through the migration to institutional environments that enable the normative guidance of cooperation and norm enforcement behaviours.

ОРГАНИЗАЦИЯ МЕСТНОГО ПРОМЫШЛЕННОГО ПРОИЗВОДСТВА В СЕЛЬСКИХ РАЙОНАХ ЯКУТИИ В ГОДЫ ВЕЛИКОЙ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ ВОЙНЫ

The article is devoted to the history of the activity of local industry enterprises within the Yakut ASSR during the Great Patriotic War on the organization of the industrial production of consumer goods and foodstuffs from local raw materials. It is shown that during the war years the rural population began to be involved in industrial production. The problem of approaching the production of goods for the population to the sources of raw materials and the consumer was being solved. The natural combination of the state efforts and cooperation in the harsh conditions of the wartime in solving the problems of the development of local production made it possible to achieve positive results in meeting the population’s needs for goods and household services.

Power of Joint Decision-Making in a Finitely-Repeated Dilemma

A rich body of literature has proposed that pairs behave significantly differently from individuals due to a number of reasons such as group polarization. This paper experimentally compares cooperation behaviors between pairs and individuals in a finitely-repeated two-player public goods game (continuous prisoner’s dilemma game). We show that pairs contribute significantly more than individuals to their group accounts. Especially when two pairs are matched with each other for the entire periods, they successfully build long-lasting cooperative relationships with their matched pairs. Our detailed analyses suggest that the enhanced cooperation behavior of pairs may be driven by (a) the mere fact that they have partners as decision-making units when they make decisions, (b) group polarization – those who initially prefer to contribute smaller amounts are more affected by the partners in their pairs, and (c) stronger conditional cooperation behavior of pairs to their matched pairs.

Dispositional free riders do not free ride on punishment

Strong reciprocity explains prosocial cooperation by the presence of individuals who incur costs to help those who helped them (‘strong positive reciprocity’) and to punish those who wronged them (‘strong negative reciprocity’). Theories of social preferences predict that in contrast to ‘strong reciprocators’, self-regarding people cooperate and punish only if there are sufficient future benefits. Here, we test this prediction in a two-stage design. First, participants are classified according to their disposition towards strong positive reciprocity as either dispositional conditional cooperators (DCC) or dispositional free riders (DFR). Participants then play a one-shot public goods game, either with or without punishment. As expected, DFR cooperate only when punishment is possible, whereas DCC cooperate without punishment. Surprisingly, dispositions towards strong positive reciprocity are unrelated to strong negative reciprocity: punishment by DCC and DFR is practically identical. The ‘burden of cooperation’ is thus carried by a larger set of individuals than previously assumed.

Conditional Cooperation and Framing Effects

This paper presents evidence from a lab experiment investigating whether the preeminence of conditional cooperators in studies using the method of Fischbacher, Gächter and Fehr (2001, Economics Letters) is sensitive to changes in the experimental frame. The treatments vary the framing such that the salience of conditionality to subjects is reduced. The results show that these manipulations affect the distribution of elicited types. However, there is no evidence that the framing of Fischbacher et al. overestimates the fraction of conditional cooperators compared to the other frames considered in the experiment. Furthermore, this research finds that conditional contributions elicited using the Fischbacher et al. (2001) frame are the most consistent with contributions in a one-shot public good game.

Conditional Cooperation and the Effect of Punishment

We study how punishment influences conditional cooperation. We ask two questions: 1) how does conditional cooperation change if a subject can be punished and 2) how does conditional cooperation change if a subject has the power to punish others. In particular, we disentangle the decision to be a conditional cooperator at all from the strength of conditional cooperation. We find that the possibility of being punished increases the strength of conditional cooperation. At the same time the possibility of being punished increases the number of free riders. In our study the net effect on cooperation still is positive. The possibility of punishing others has two effects: Substitution and responsibility. Players substitute conditional cooperation with punishment which leads to a decrease in conditional cooperation. The power to punish means more responsibility which leads to an increase in conditional cooperation. In our design the overall effect of responsibility is stronger than the effect of substitution. We conclude that the threat of being punished and the power to punish changes conditional cooperation behavior in several, unexpected, ways.

Evolutionary Dynamics of Coordinated Cooperation

In social evolution theory, unconditional cooperation has been seen as an evolutionarily unsuccessful strategy unless there is a mechanism that promotes positive assortment between like individuals. One such example is kin selection, where individuals sharing common ancestry and therefore having the same strategy are more likely to interact with each other. Conditional cooperation, on the other hand, can be successful if interactions with the same partners last long. In many previous models, it has been assumed that individuals act conditionally on the past behavior of others. Here I propose a new model of conditional cooperation, namely the model of coordinated cooperation. Coordinated cooperation means that there is a negotiation before an actual game is played, and that each individual can flexibly change their decision, either to cooperation or to defection, according to the number of those who show the intention of cooperation/defection. A notable feature of my model is that individuals play an actual game only once but can still use conditional strategies. Since such a negotiation is cognitively demanding, the target of my model here is exclusively human behavior. I have analyzed \revise{cultural} evolutionary dynamics of conditional strategies in this framework. Results for an infinitely large population show that conditional cooperation not only works as a catalyst for the evolution of cooperation, but sustains a polymorphic attractor with unconditional cooperators, unconditional defectors, and conditional cooperators being present. A finite population analysis is also performed. Overall, my results provide one explanation of why people tend to take into account others' decisions even when doing so gives them no payoff consequences at all.

Clustered networks protect cooperation against catastrophic collapse

AbstractAssuming a society of conditional cooperators (or moody conditional cooperators), this computational study proposes a new perspective on the structural advantage of social network clustering. Previous work focused on how clustered structure might encourage initialoutbreaks of cooperationor defend against invasion by a few defectors. Instead, we explore the ability of a societal structure to retain cooperative norms in the face of widespread disturbances. Such disturbances may abstractly describe hardships like famine and economic recession, or the random spatial placement of a substantial numbers ofpure defectors(orround-1 defectors) among a spatially structured population of players in a laboratory game, etc.As links in tightly clustered societies are reallocated to distant contacts, we observe that a society becomes increasingly susceptible tocatastrophic cascades of defection: mutually-beneficial cooperative norms can be destroyed completely by modest shocks of defection. In contrast, networks with higher clustering coefficients can withstand larger shocks of defection before being forced to catastrophically low levels of cooperation. We observe a remarkably linearprotective effect of clusteringcoefficient that becomes active above acritical level of clustering. Notably, both the critical level and the slope of this dependence is higher for decision-rule parameterizations that correspond to highercosts of cooperation. Our modeling framework provides a simple way to reinterpret the counter-intuitive and widely cited human experiments of Suri and Watts (2011) while also affirming the classical intuition that network clustering and higher levels of cooperation should be positively associated.

Beliefs about others\u2019 intentions determine whether cooperation is the faster choice

Is collaboration the fast choice for humans? Past studies proposed that cooperation is a behavioural default, based on Response Times (RT) findings. Here we contend that the individual’s reckoning of the immediate social environment shapes her predisposition to cooperate and, hence, response latencies. In a social dilemma game, we manipulate the beliefs about the partner’s intentions to cooperate and show that they act as a switch that determines cooperation and defection RTs; when the partner’s intention to cooperate is perceived as high, cooperation choices are speeded up, while defection is slowed down. Importantly, this social context effect holds across varying expected payoffs, indicating that it modulates behaviour regardless of choices’ similarity in monetary terms. Moreover, this pattern is moderated by individual variability in social preferences: Among conditional cooperators, high cooperation beliefs speed up cooperation responses and slow down defection. Among free-riders, defection is always faster and more likely than cooperation, while high cooperation beliefs slow down all decisions. These results shed new light on the conflict of choices account of response latencies, as well as on the intuitive cooperation hypothesis, and can help to correctly interpret and reconcile previous, apparently contradictory results, by considering the role of context in social dilemmas.

Testing Local Descriptive Norms and Salience of Enforcement Action: A Field Experiment to Increase Tax Collection

The use of behavioural science interventions, and particularly social norms, in tax compliance has become a growth industry for scholars and practitioners alike in recent years. However, these interventions largely represent a 'black box', where effects could be explained by a pro-social desire to support one's community, conditional cooperation, desire to conform, or fear of reprisals. We conduct an experiment in local government taxation in the United Kingdom which tests social norms against a control condition and against messages that highlight the enforcement process. Social norms outperforms enforcement salience, suggesting that this explanation, although more powerful than the control, does not fully explain compliance effects. By comparing results to previous studies, we find that these effects are larger for local taxes than national ones, even when comparing similar taxpayers. This provides further evidence that social norm type interventions can be most effective when using norms from socially closer reference groups.

Evolution of Cooperation with Heterogeneous Conditional Cooperators

Conditional cooperation declines over time if heterogeneous ideal conditional agents are involved in repeated interactions. With strict assumptions of rationality and a population consisting of ideal conditional agents who strictly follow a decision rule, cooperation is not expected. However, cooperation is commonly observed in human societies. Hence, we propose a novel evolutionary agent-based model where agents rely on social information. Each agent interacts only once either as a donor or as a receiver. In our model, the population consists of either non-ideal or ideal heterogeneous conditional agents. Their donation decisions are stochastically based on the comparison between the number of donations in the group and their conditional cooperative criterion value. Non-ideal agents occasionally cooperate even if the conditional rule of the agent is not satisfied. The stochastic decision and selection rules are controlled with decision intensity and selection intensity, respectively. The simulations show that high levels of cooperation (more than 90%) are established in the population with non-ideal agents for a particular range of parameter values. The emergence of cooperation needs non-ideal agents and a heterogeneous population. The current model differs from existing models by relying on social information and not on individual agent’s prior history of cooperation.