Dilemma Experiment Research Articles

Cooperation in the Gig Economy: Insights from Upwork Freelancers

Existing literature on online labor markets predominantly focuses on how freelancers individually complete tasks and projects. Our study examines freelancers' willingness to work collaboratively. We report results from a survey of 122 freelancers on a leading online labor market platform (Upwork) that examine freelancers' preferences for collaborative work arrangements, and that explore several antecedents of cooperative behaviors. We then test if actual cooperative behavior matches with freelancers' stated preferences through an incentivized social dilemma experiment. We find that respondents cooperate at a higher rate (85%) than reported in previous comparable studies (between 50-75%). This high rate of cooperation may be explained by an ingroup bias. Using a sequential mediation model, we demonstrate the importance of a sense of shared expectations and accountability for cooperation. We contribute to a better understanding of the potential for collaborative work on online labor market platforms by assessing if and what social factors and collective culture exist among freelancers. We discuss the implications of our results for platform designers by highlighting the importance of platform features that promote shared expectations and improve accountability. Overall, contrary to existing literature and predictions, our results suggest that freelancers in our sample display traits that are more consistent with belonging to a coherent group with a shared collective culture, rather than being anonymous actors in a transaction-based market.

The causal effect of cultural identity on cooperation

The impact of culture on non-kin cooperation has been singled out as critical for economic activity. However, causal evidence of culture's influence on cooperation remains scant. In this paper we provide such evidence, focusing on two key components of culture: preferences and beliefs. Adopting the view that culture is one aspect of an individual's multi-faceted self-concept (identity) we conduct a Prisoner's Dilemma experiment with first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants at a large US public university. In a two-by-two design, we exogenously vary: i) the salience of participants' American or Chinese cultural identities; and ii) the capacity for culture to affect beliefs by randomly providing previous-session cooperation-rate information. Comparing behavior across cultures and information conditions, our results suggest a prominent role for both preferences and beliefs.

Assessing the effects of pandemic risk on cooperation and social norms using a before-after Covid-19 comparison in two long-term experiments

How does threat from disease shape our cooperative actions and the social norms that guide such behaviour? To study these questions, we draw on a collective-risk social dilemma experiment that we ran before the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic (Wave 1, 2018) and compare this to its exact replication, sampling from the same population, that we conducted during the first wave of the pandemic (Wave 2, 2020). Tightness-looseness theory predicts and evidence generally supports that both cooperation and accompanying social norms should increase, yet, we mostly did not find this. Contributions, the probability of reaching the threshold (cooperation), and the contents of the social norm (how much people should contribute) remained similar across the waves, although the strength of these social norms were slightly greater in Wave 2. We also study whether the results from Wave 1 that should not be affected by the pandemic—the relationship between social norms and cooperation and specific behavioural types—replicate in Wave 2 and find that these results generally hold. Overall, our work demonstrates that social norms are important drivers of cooperation, yet, communicable diseases, at least in the short term, have little or no effects on either.

The effect of historical payoffs on individual strategy updates in the Prisoner's Dilemma

Understanding the evolution of cooperation among selfish individuals remains a big challenge. In this paper, we introduce a new update rule in which individuals make decision according to their historical performance in the Prisoner's Dilemma game on a square lattice. Comparing our results with the Prisoner's Dilemma experiment, such an update rule can explain the experiment well, suggesting that this update rule may be useful for understanding the behavior of individuals in the experiment. Importantly, we can use this rule to explain the moody conditional cooperation.

Pro-social risk-taking and intergroup conflict: A volunteer's dilemma experiment

Pro-social risk-taking involves the willingness to commit resources to initiatives and opportunities with a social benefit, as well as a risk of costly failure. These situations often occur in an environment in which groups compete for resources. In these contexts of intergroup conflict, often individuals make personal sacrifices on a voluntary basis, involving considerable risks of failure. We study the context of pro-social risk-taking and intergroup conflict by extending the volunteer's dilemma along both of these dimensions. We introduce a novel group competition treatment to identify the effect of intergroup competition without providing with an additional collective prize like the majority of past laboratory experiments. We find evidence that intergroup competition significantly increases the rate of providing a public good, and mitigates the negative impact of risk on intragroup cooperation. Regarding individual heterogeneity, we explore and discuss the impact of risk aversion and gender, and its implication for parochial altruism.

Evolutionary instability of selfish learning in repeated games.

Across many domains of interaction, both natural and artificial, individuals use past experience to shape future behaviors. The results of such learning processes depend on what individuals wish to maximize. A natural objective is one's own success. However, when two such "selfish" learners interact with each other, the outcome can be detrimental to both, especially when there are conflicts of interest. Here, we explore how a learner can align incentives with a selfish opponent. Moreover, we consider the dynamics that arise when learning rules themselves are subject to evolutionary pressure. By combining extensive simulations and analytical techniques, we demonstrate that selfish learning is unstable in most classical two-player repeated games. If evolution operates on the level of long-run payoffs, selection instead favors learning rules that incorporate social (other-regarding) preferences. To further corroborate these results, we analyze data from a repeated prisoner's dilemma experiment. We find that selfish learning is insufficient to explain human behavior when there is a trade-off between payoff maximization and fairness.

Social Learning Strategies and Cooperative Behaviour: Evidence of Payoff Bias, but Not Prestige or Conformity, in a Social Dilemma Game

Human cooperation, occurring without reciprocation and between unrelated individuals in large populations, represents an evolutionary puzzle. One potential explanation is that cooperative behaviour may be transmitted between individuals via social learning. Using an online social dilemma experiment, we find evidence that participants’ contributions were more consistent with payoff-biased transmission than prestige-biased transmission or conformity. We also found some evidence for lower cooperation (i) when exposed to social information about peer cooperation levels than without such information, and (ii) in the prisoners’ dilemma game compared to the snowdrift game. A simulation model established that the observed cooperation was more likely to be caused by participants’ general propensity to cooperate than by the effect of social learning strategies employed within the experiment, but that this cooperative propensity could be reduced through selection. Overall, our results support previous experimental evidence indicating the role of payoff-biased transmission in explaining cooperative behaviour, but we find that this effect was small and was overwhelmed by participants’ general propensity for cooperation.

Evidence from a long-term experiment that collective risks change social norms and promote cooperation

Social norms can help solve pressing societal challenges, from mitigating climate change to reducing the spread of infectious diseases. Despite their relevance, how norms shape cooperation among strangers remains insufficiently understood. Influential theories also suggest that the level of threat faced by different societies plays a key role in the strength of the norms that cultures evolve. Still little causal evidence has been collected. Here we deal with this dual challenge using a 30-day collective-risk social dilemma experiment to measure norm change in a controlled setting. We ask whether a looming risk of collective loss increases the strength of cooperative social norms that may avert it. We find that social norms predict cooperation, causally affect behavior, and that higher risk leads to stronger social norms that are more resistant to erosion when the risk changes. Taken together, our results demonstrate the causal effect of social norms in promoting cooperation and their role in making behavior resilient in the face of exogenous change.

Group size, signaling and the effect of democracy

A number of papers document that rules governing social dilemmas work better when implemented democratically than when imposed from above (the “effect of democracy”). This paper presents a theoretical model of the effect of democracy and uses laboratory experiments to test a key prediction emerging from the model, namely that the effect of democracy is stronger in small than in large communities. Results from a prisoner's dilemma experiment show that an effect of democracy is present in groups of all sizes but decreases strongly and becomes less persistent as the number of group members increases. In some respects, therefore, democracy appears to work best in small groups.

Market knowledge as a driver of sustainable use of common-pool resources: A lab-in-the-field study among pastoralists in Ethiopia

Rural communities that depend on common-pool resources for their livelihoods are being increasingly affected by the expanding global market system. Because such market integration is still relatively thin, communities vary in terms of market comprehension. Using a common-pool resource dilemma experiment, this study examines the effect of market knowledge on decisions concerning the use of common-pool resources among Borana pastoralists. Participants chose to use shared grazing rangelands at low or high levels of grazing intensity. Depending on the resource-use decisions in previous rounds, the participants encountered different pasture-availability conditions that required them to make trade-offs between their short-term interests and the long-term sustainability of the shared rangelands. The results indicate that, when resource conditions were good, resource users with more market knowledge are more likely to choose lower grazing intensity. During scarcity, this effect is weaker. The results further show that within-group variance in market knowledge has a negative effect on decisions relating to sustainable-resource use in times of resource scarcity. The results imply that providing an understanding of market functioning is of vital importance to protecting shared natural resources from depletion in communities experiencing increasing impact from the global market economy.

Motivational foundations of communication, voluntary cooperation, and self-governance in a common-pool resource dilemma

Conventional wisdom (rational choice theory) assumes that individuals are destined to collectively destroy vital ecological systems due to their narrow self-interest. In contrast, Humanistic Rational Choice Theory (HRCT) assumes individuals can cooperatively self-govern, devising effective conservation agreements and governance systems to constrain self-interest for mutual benefit. To test this assumption, we examined the motivational, perceptual, and cooperative outcomes of communication in a resource dilemma experiment. HRCT assumes that poorly managed dilemmas undermine people's fundamental needs (e.g., procedural justice, security, equity), motivating them to self-govern. Groups that make decisions fairly (e.g., democratically) and enforce their agreements, should satisfy their collective needs better, ensuring better institutional acceptance and trust, thereby improving cooperation and sustainability. Small groups of four (N = 41 groups) harvested valuable resources from a shared pool without communication (Phase 1), with communication (Phase 2), and then without communication (Phase 3). Groups destroyed the resource and reported low need satisfaction during Phase 1. During Phase 2, most groups created governance systems, greatly improving their need satisfaction (ds≥1.32), trust (d = 2.30), cooperation and resource sustainability (η2=0.87). Democratically governed groups reported the greatest need satisfaction, intrinsic motivation (i.e., institutional internalization and acceptance), and trust, especially if they primarily used positive social sanctions (e.g., praise) to enforce their agreements. Negative sanctions (e.g., shaming, threats) backfired, unless used in democratic groups. These factors accounted for 47% of the variance in Phase 3 voluntary cooperation and resource sustainability. Groups self-governed to collectively satisfy their interdependent fundamental needs.

Do people imitate when making decisions? Evidence from a spatial Prisoner's Dilemma experiment.

How do people decide which action to take? This question is best answered using Game Theory, which has proposed a series of decision-making mechanisms that people potentially use. In network simulations, wherein games are repeated and pay-off differences can be observed, those mechanisms often rely on imitation of successful behaviour. Surprisingly, little to no evidence has been provided about whether people actually imitate more successful opponents when altering their actions in that context. By comparing two experimental treatments wherein participants play the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game in a lattice, we aim to answer whether more successful actions are imitated. While in the first treatment, participants have the possibility to use pay-off differences in making their decision, the second treatment hinders such imitation as no information about the gains is provided. If imitation of the more successful plays a role then there should be a difference in how players switch from cooperation to defection between both treatments. Although, cooperation and pay-off levels do not appear to be significantly different between both treatments, detailed analysis shows that there are behavioural differences: when confronted with a more successful co-player, the focal player will imitate her behaviour as the switching is related to the experienced pay-off inequality.

Behavioural patterns behind the demise of the commons across different cultures.

Common-pool resources require a dose of self-restraint to ensure sustainable exploitation, but this has often proven elusive in practice. To understand why, and characterize behaviours towards ecological systems in general, we devised a social dilemma experiment in which participants gain profit from harvesting a virtual forest vulnerable to overexploitation. Out of 16 Chinese and 15 Spanish player groups, only one group from each country converged to the forest’s maximum sustainable yield. All other groups were overzealous, with about half of them surpassing or on the way to surpass a no-recovery threshold. Computational–statistical analyses attribute such outcomes to an interplay between three prominent player behaviours, two of which are subject to decision-making ‘inertia’ that causes near blindness to the resource state. These behaviours, being equally pervasive among players from both nations, imply that the commons fall victim to behavioural patterns robust to confounding factors such as age, education and culture.

Pro-environmental behavior as a signal of cooperativeness: Evidence from a social dilemma experiment

Pro-environmental behavior has social signaling value. Previous research suggests that enacting pro-environmental behaviors can signal certain personal characteristics, such as social status and trustworthiness, to others. Using an incentivized experiment, we show that people known to behave pro-environmentally are expected to be more cooperative, are preferred as cooperation partners, and elicit more cooperation from others. The presence of pro-environmental individuals may thus motivate others to exert more effort towards reaching cooperative goals, even in situations where individual and group goals are at odds (i.e., social dilemmas). However, people who behaved pro-environmentally were actually no more cooperative than those performing fewer pro-environmental behaviors.

Cooperation in an Assortative Matching Prisoners Dilemma Experiment with Pro-Social Dummies

Assortative matching (AM) can be theoretically an effective means to facilitate cooperation. We designed a controlled lab experiment with three treatments on multi-round prisoner’s dilemma. With matching based on weighted history (WH) as surrogate for AM, we show that adding pro-social dummies to the WH treatment may significantly improve cooperation, compared to both the random matching and the WH treatment. In society where assortative matching is effective and promoted by the underlying culture, institutional promotion of virtue role models can be interpreted as generating additional pro-social dummies, so as to move the initial state of cooperators into the basin of attraction for a highly cooperative polymorphic equilibrium.

Cooperation through indirect reciprocity: The impact of higher-order history

Amid rapidly growing globalization and digitalization, trades often occur in one-time encounters, where cooperation depends on indirect reciprocity. This study investigates how people use higher-order information to aid in cooperation decisions. A random matching prisoners' dilemma experiment with optional history information up to the second order is conducted. With a novel continuous extension, we show that reputation scores standing and judging significantly affect cooperation decisions. Majority of the subjects respond to higher-order scores individually, and incorporating individual heterogeneity significantly improves the overall fit in aggregate regressions. A modified pooled mixture model classifies 31.7% of the subjects' behaviors into higher-order types. Subjects learn to use the judging score through their experiences. The reputation effect is stronger when subjects have first played the no-information baseline game, where reputation scores are more effective in a complementary way. We also find that cooperation improvement is significantly lower in the treatment with first-order information only.

An Honest Day's Pay: Cooperation among Entrepreneurs vs. Students, and Linkages to Real‐World Business Success

The importance of cooperative behavior in business environments has been theorized in the field of management. However, measuring cooperation quantitatively is often challenging. We take advantage of experimental methods to overcome this issue. Particularly, we study the decisions that small‐scale entrepreneurs in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, make in a laboratory property rights dilemma experiment, comparing these to the decisions of student counterparts in the same and other countries, and looking for correlations between lab decisions and success in real‐world business sales. We find that Mongolian entrepreneurs generally achieve much higher cooperation levels and hence higher experimental earnings than Mongolian students. Also, among individual participants, producing and desisting from theft in the lab setting is correlated at the 1% level with real‐world business sales. Our findings align with the view that cooperative impulses or abidance of social norms can be an advantage in business relationships.

Discouraging Rainforest Transformation: An Ex‐ante Policy Impact Analysis

AbstractDespite extensive efforts made by national and international certification agencies, Indonesian smallholder farmers’ participation in palm oil certification schemes adoption remains low. A fundamental obstacle is the smallholder practice of rainforest transformation into oil palm plantation which is forbidden by the agencies. In this context, we investigate three policies that could lead to a reduction in rainforest deforestation by smallholders: price premium on certified palm oil; the provision of environmental information; contributor recognition. In order to evaluate the influence of the policies ex‐ante, we conduct a social dilemma experiment involving rubber and oil palm smallholders in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. The findings indicate that the price premium and provision of context‐specific environmental information could reduce rainforest transformation. However, a statistically significant effect of contributor recognition was not found.

Perfect and imperfect strangers in social dilemmas

This paper focuses on social dilemma games in which players may or may not meet the same partner again in the future. A novel prisoner’s dilemma experiment, a meta-analysis of public goods experiments, and a meta-analysis of previous prisoner’s dilemma experiments document high cooperation rates if the likelihood to meet the same partner again in the future is high.

The effect of psychopathy on cooperative strategies in an iterated Prisoner\u2019s Dilemma experiment with emotional feedback

As decision-making research becomes more popular, the inclusion of personality traits has emerged as a focal point for an exhaustive analysis of human behaviour. In this study, we investigate the impact of psychopathic traits on cooperation in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game with emotional facial feedback. Firstly, we observed how receiving a facial feedback after each decision affected players with different psychopathic trait scores, and how being informed about the opponent’s identity influenced cooperative behaviour. Secondly, we analysed the strategies adopted by each player, and how these choices were correlated with their psychopathic traits. Although our results showed no effect of different emotional content in the feedback on cooperation, we observed more cooperative behaviours in those players who were told their opponent was another fellow human, compared to those who were told it was a computer. Moreover, fearless dominance had a very small but consistent negative effect on overall cooperation and on the tendency to maintain cooperative behaviours. We also found that players’ personality scores affected the strategies they chose to play throughout the game. Hence, our experiment adds complexity to the body of work investigating psychopathic traits and social interactions, considering not only the environment of facial feedback but also the role of deception in experimental games.