Repeated Interactions Research Articles

Raven food calls indicate sender\u2019s age and sex

BackgroundAcoustic parameters of animal signals have been shown to correlate with various phenotypic characteristics of the sender. These acoustic characteristics can be learned and categorized and thus are a basis for perceivers’ recognition abilities. One of the most demanding capacities is individual recognition, achievable only after repeated interactions with the same individual. Still, class-level recognition might be potentially important to perceivers who have not previously encountered callers but can classify unknown individuals according to the already learned categories. Especially for species with high fission-fusion dynamics that repeatedly encounter unknown individuals it may be advantageous to develop class-level recognition. We tested whether frequency-, temporal-, and amplitude-related acoustic parameters of vocalizations emitted by ravens, a species showing high fission-fusion dynamics in non-breeder aggregations, are connected to phenotypic characteristics and thus have the potential for class-level recognition.ResultsThe analysis of 418 food calls revealed that some components summarizing acoustic parameters were differentiated by age-classes and sex.ConclusionsTogether, the results provide evidence for the co-variation of vocal characteristics and respective sex and age categories, a prerequisite for class-level recognition in perceivers. Perceivers that are ignorant of the caller’s identity can thus potentially recognize these class-level differences for decision-making processes in feeding contexts.

Social motivation in people with recent-onset schizophrenia spectrum disorders

People with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD) often experience impairments in non-social motivation. In this study, we extended this line of investigation by examining specific components of social motivation and the extent to which these components work together in people with and without a recent-onset SSD. Sixty-four people with a recent-onset SSD and 26 controls completed a task that allowed us to examine changes in anticipated pleasure, decisions to trust, and effort expenditure over the course of repeated interactions with positive or negative outcomes. Compared to controls, we found that people in the SSD group placed less trust, tended to anticipate less pleasure, and expended less effort to increase the likelihood of future interactions with positive outcomes. Further, in the SSD group, effort expenditure was not associated with either anticipated pleasure or decisions to trust. While there were no group differences in anticipated pleasure or trust placed during interactions with negative outcomes, people in the SSD group expended less effort to decrease to the likelihood of future interactions. Taken together, our findings suggest that people with a recent-onset SSD may experience both impairment and disconnection between various components of social motivation for interactions with positive outcomes. Implications for interventions for social engagement in people with SSD are discussed.

Corruption and competition among bureaucrats: An experimental study

We use a laboratory experiment to investigate how the introduction of competition between public officials for the provision of a government service affects extortionary corruption, i.e., the demands of harassment bribes. We examine transactions that are likely to be one-shot, such as the delivery of a driver's license, and transactions that require frequent interactions between the parties and therefore allow for reputation building, such as yearly renewals of building permits. Finally, we examine officials’ ability to collude by communicating before setting their bribe demands. We find that introducing competition significantly reduces corruption both in settings characterized by one-shot and by repeated interactions between citizens and officials. While the possibility of collusion lowers the effectiveness of competition, officials are unable to sustain collusion in the long run.

Efficient chip strategies in repeated games

We study a class of chip strategies in repeated games of incomplete information. This class generalizes the strategies studied by Mobius (2001) in the context of a favor-exchange model and the strategies studied in our companion paper Olszewski and Safronov (2017). In two-player games, if players have private values and their types evolve according to independent Markov chains, then under very mild conditions on the stage game, the efficient outcome can be approximated by chip-strategy equilibria when the discount factor tends to 1. We extend this result (assuming stronger conditions) to stage games with any number of players. Chip strategies can be viewed as a positive model of repeated interactions, and the insights from our analysis seem applicable in similar contexts, not covered by the present analysis.

Adaptive play stabilizes cooperation in continuous public goods games

We construct a model to study the effects of repeated interaction on the evolution of cooperation in continuous public goods games. Instead of preassigning the duration of repeatedness, the likelihood of group entering next round interaction is positively dependent on the group’s current cooperativeness. Meanwhile, when the disturbance happens, the interaction terminates. Under rare mutations, we show that such adaptive play can lead to the dominance of full cooperative state for weak disturbance. For fairly strong disturbance, all-or-none cooperative states share higher fractions of time in the long run, results similar to the ones reported in the study (Pinheiro et al., 2014) while differing from the ones reported in another relevant study (Van Segbroeck et al., 2012), although only strategy space and way determining next round vary. Our results remain valid when groups enter next round with a given probability independent of groups’ cooperativeness. In the synergic public goods games, the positive effects of repeated interactions on promoting cooperation is further strengthened. In the discounted public goods game, only very weak disturbance can lead to the dominance of full cooperative state while fairly strong disturbance can favor both full cooperative state and a partially cooperative state. Our study thus enriches the literature on the evolution of cooperation in repeated public goods games.

Narrative and Institutional Economics

This article addresses a range of questions associated with the occurrence of a new field of study - narrative economics, which is considered in the context of modern institutionalism. Pioneering works of R. Shiller, G. Akerlof, and D. Snower spotlighted the importance of analyzing narratives and narrative influence when studying economic processes. In this paper, a qualitative study of narratives is seen through the prism of an answer to the question: How do prescribed narratives influence institutions and change them?. Narratives have much in common with institutions since very often, explicitly or implicitly, they contain value judgments about social interactions or normative aspects shaping behavioral patterns. The identification of dominating narratives enables us to understand better how institutions influence economic (social) action. Repeated interactions among social actors are structured through understanding and learning the rules. Understanding of social rules comes from the language - we articulate and perceive the rules drawing on common narratives. Narratives and institutions are helpful when actors gain knowledge about various forms of social communication. Digital technologies, mass media, and social networking sites facilitate the spread of narratives, values, and beliefs; this process is characterized by increasing returns. Studying narratives and institutions is crucial for modern economic theory because it helps to improve qualitative and quantitative methods of analyzing empirical evidence and enables researchers to understand complex economic processes.

Why Test the Theory of Incentives in a Dynamic Framework?

The recognition that contracts have a time dimension has given rise to an abundant literature since the end of the 1980s. In such a dynamic context, the contract may take place over several periods, and agents develop repeated interactions. Surprisingly, few papers have tried to apply the predictions of the dynamic theory incentives to data. However, taking a dynamic context into account can improve static empirical approaches by introducing new tools to distinguish between adverse selection and moral hazard, two asymmetrical contexts representative of the Principal–Agent model, or by solving the problem of endogeneity. A dynamic empirical approach also allows to renew the theoretical contract conception, and reveals some new features of contracts: memory, learning, and commitment.

Strategic Interaction in a Repeated Game: Evidence from NCAA Football Recruiting

We analyze decisions to comply or cheat on NCAA recruiting regulations in the context of repeated interactions. Teams possess private information about resources devoted to football programs, recruiting effort made by rival programs, and rival program behavior. We test for evidence that the behavior of NCAA Division IA football programs conforms to predictions from repeated game theoretic models using panel data from IA football over the period 1978–2005. We find anecdotal and empirical support for strategic interaction. The presence of in-conference rivals under NCAA sanctions increases the probability of a team being placed under future sanctions.

Anticipated pleasure for positive and negative social interaction outcomes in schizophrenia

While recent research suggests that people with schizophrenia anticipate less pleasure for non-social events, considerably less is known about anticipated pleasure for social events. In this study, we investigated whether people with and without schizophrenia differ in the amount and updating of anticipated pleasure over the course of repeated interactions as well as the influence of emotional displays. Thirty-two people with schizophrenia and 29 controls rated their anticipated pleasure over the course of repeated interactions with smiling, scowling, or neutral social partners that had either positive or negative outcomes. Compared to controls, people with schizophrenia anticipated a lower amount of pleasure during interactions with smiling, but not neutral social partners that had positive outcomes. However, the groups did not differ in the amount or updating of anticipated pleasure during interactions that had negative outcomes. Both groups anticipated more pleasure over the course of repeated interactions with smiling partners and less pleasure over the course of repeated interactions with scowling partners compared to interactions with neutral partners. We discuss how less anticipated pleasure for interactions with smiling social partners may be linked to difficulties in social engagement among people with schizophrenia.

Cooperation and Trust in Japanese and British Samples: Evidence From Incomplete Information Games

Most human relationships are characterized by reciprocal patterns of give-and-take that can be studied using a decision-making task called the Centipede game. The game involves 2 players alternating in choosing between cooperation and defection, with their choices affecting payoffs to themselves and the co-player. We compared trust and cooperation of Japanese and U.K. samples in the Centipede game. To increase the game’s applicability to real-life decision situations, we added 3 treatment conditions to manipulate payoff information. Our between-subjects design comprised the following 4 conditions: (a) full payoff information, (b) full payoff information framed as percentages, (c) partial payoff information with absolute (own payoff) information only, and (d) partial payoff information with relative information only. Comparing Japanese and U.K. students’ decisions, the Japanese cooperated significantly more frequently than the British. The manipulation of payoff information also affected decision making. In Japan, both treatment conditions with incomplete information yielded significantly higher cooperation levels than the control. In the U.K., only the condition with absolute payoff information produced significantly higher cooperativeness. Overall, these findings suggest that Japanese samples cooperate more frequently in repeated interactions than British samples and that this may be due to the assurance-based trust elicited by reciprocal relationships that has been identified as a typical feature of Japanese culture. In situations with incomplete information, expectations about the stake size may guide decision making, with lower expectations resulting in higher cooperation levels.

What Situation Is This? Coarse Cognition and Behavior Over a Space of Games

We study strategic interaction between agents who distill the complex world around them into simpler situations. Assuming agents share the same cognitive frame, we show how the frame affects equilibrium outcomes. In one-shot and repeated interactions, the frame causes agents to be either better or worse off than if they could perceive the environment in full detail: it creates a fog of cooperation or a fog of conflict. In repeated interaction, the frame is as important as agentsO patience in determining the set of equilibria: for a fixed discount factor, when all agents coordinate on what they perceive as the best equilibrium, there remain significant performance differences across dyads with different frames. Finally, we analyze some tensions between incremental versus radical changes in the cognitive frame.

Selecting early adopters to foster the diffusion of innovations in industrial markets

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to bring new empirical evidence to the controversial role of early adopters in the diffusion of innovations in industrial markets.Design/methodology/approachThe authors apply an actor market configuration perspective to the analysis of four longitudinal case studies regarding the commercialization of new products in the textile, plastic and energy industries.FindingsThe diffusion of innovation is an interactive and iterative process where the commercializing firm engages in repeated interactions with different categories of companies that are targeted as potential early adopters. This process ends when the commercializing firm identifies a category of early adopters that can stimulate subsequent acceptance in the later market, by playing one of the following two roles, i.e. word-of-mouth trigger and industry benchmark. During this process, through which the role of the early adopters is constructed proactively by the commercializing firm, the product innovation is also subject to changes to provide a better fit with the selected category of early adopters.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper calls for a re-conceptualization of the diffusion process, from a passive identification of early adopters to an interactive process that entails a trial-and-error approach in the targeting and involvement of different categories of early adopters, which ends when the innovation reaches the desired levels of diffusion.Practical implicationsThe study provides managers with a number of recommendations for selecting the most proper category of early adopters for their innovations, depending on the role they are more likely to play and the influence they will exert on subsequent acceptance in the later market.Social implicationsThe study provides managers with a number of recommendations for targeting, through a trial-and-error process, early adopters and working with them to champion the dissemination of new technologies.Originality/valueThis paper significantly adds to existing literature on the diffusion of innovation, which has up to now conceived early adopters as static and given entities, which cannot be proactively selected by the commercializing firm, and innovation as an immutable object.

How to change contracts into beneficial relationships – the results of empirical research

How to change contracts into beneficial relationships – the results of empirical research

Does the truth come naturally? Time pressure increases honesty in one-shot deception games

Many situations require people to act quickly and are characterized by asymmetric information. Since asymmetric information makes people tempted to misreport their private information for their own benefit, it is of primary importance to understand whether time pressure affects honest behavior. A theory of social heuristics (the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, SHH), predicts that, in case of one-shot interactions, such an effect exists and it is positive. The SHH proposes that when people have no time to evaluate all available alternatives, they tend to rely on heuristics, choices that are optimal in everyday, repeated interactions and that have been internalized over time; and then, after deliberation, people shift their behavior towards the one that is optimal in the given interaction. Thus, the SHH predicts that time pressure increases honesty in one-shot interactions (because honesty may be optimal in repeated interactions, while dishonesty is always optimal in the short run). However, to the best of our knowledge, no experimental studies have tested this prediction. Here, I report a large (N=1013) study aimed at filling this gap. In this study, participants were given a private information and were asked to report it within 5 s vs after 30 s. The interaction was one-shot, and payoffs were such that subjects had an incentive to lie. As predicted by the SHH, I find that time pressure increases honest behavior. In doing so, these results provide new insights on the role of time pressure on honesty, and provide one more piece of evidence in support of the Social Heuristics Hypothesis.

Signaling Resolve: Leaders, Reputations, and the Importance of Early Interactions

ABSTRACTHow do leaders develop reputations for resolve across repeated interactions? While scholars find that leaders can acquire individual reputations for resolve, we know relatively little about how these leader-specific reputations form to begin with. This article examines how leaders develop reputations for resolve from the very beginning of their tenures and present three key hypotheses regarding these leader-specific reputations. First, statements are more influential to reputational assessments during initial interactions. Second, statements create expectations of future behavior, which interact with a leader’s subsequent actions to influence reputation development. Third, initial perceptions of resolve significantly condition later assessments. Through a process tracing survey experiment, I find evidence that resolute statements are more substantively influential during early interactions. I also find early perceptions of resolve do significantly influence later perceptions. Furthermore, statements create expectations of future behavior, and it is by meeting or defying these expectations that a leader’s reputation for resolve is improved or injured within the experiment. These results remain robust even when controlling for contextual factors, including state characteristics. The implications of these findings for both scholars and policy makers are discussed, and this study illustrates how individual leaders develop these reputations for resolve across interactions.

Living off the land: The connection between cropland, food security, and violence against civilians

Food security has attracted widespread attention in recent years. Yet, despite preliminary evidence connecting food insecurity to political violence, we lack a systematic understanding of the relationship(s) between local food resources and violence against civilians. This study develops a food-security based theory to explain the significant variation that we observe in violence against civilians across both time and subnational geographic space. We argue that combatants, be they government or rebel actors, often must turn to local agricultural resources for sustenance. During times of relative peace, armed actors and civilians have long time horizons, and the prospects of repeated interactions thereby promote a strategy of co-optation to obtain food resources. However, the existence of immediate conflict in a region leads armed actors to discount the benefits of future interactions in favor of obtaining food immediately, using violence if necessary. In estimating a series of statistical models on a sample of all African countries (1997–2009), we find robust support for our expectations: cropland increases the frequency of violence against civilians during periods of conflict, but has an added pacifying effect during times of peace.

Third-party punishment as a costly signal of high continuation probabilities in repeated games

Why do individuals pay costs to punish selfish behavior, even as third-party observers? A large body of research suggests that reputation plays an important role in motivating such third-party punishment (TPP). Here we focus on a recently proposed reputation-based account (Jordan et al., 2016) that invokes costly signaling. This account proposed that “trustworthy type” individuals (who are incentivized to cooperate with others) typically experience lower costs of TPP, and thus that TPP can function as a costly signal of trustworthiness. Specifically, it was argued that some but not all individuals face incentives to cooperate, making them high-quality and trustworthy interaction partners; and, because the same mechanisms that incentivize cooperation also create benefits for using TPP to deter selfish behavior, these individuals are likely to experience reduced costs of punishing selfishness. Here, we extend this conceptual framework by providing a concrete, “from-the-ground-up” model demonstrating how this process could work in the context of repeated interactions incentivizing both cooperation and punishment. We show how individual differences in the probability of future interaction can create types that vary in whether they find cooperation payoff-maximizing (and thus make high-quality partners), as well as in their net costs of TPP – because a higher continuation probability increases the likelihood of receiving rewards from the victim of the punished transgression (thus offsetting the cost of punishing). We also provide a simple model of dispersal that demonstrates how types that vary in their continuation probabilities can stably coexist, because the payoff from remaining in one’s local environment (i.e. not dispersing) decreases with the number of others who stay. Together, this model demonstrates, from the group up, how TPP can serve as a costly signal of trustworthiness arising from exposure to repeated interactions.

Fission-fusion dynamics over large distances in raven non-breeders

The influence of fission-fusion dynamics, i.e., temporal variation in group size and composition, on social complexity has been studied in large-brained mammals that rely on social bonds. Little is known about birds, even though some species like ravens have recently received attention for their socio-cognitive skills and use of social bonds. While raven breeders defend territories year-round, non-breeders roam through large areas and form groups at food sources or night roosts. We here examined the fission-fusion patterns of non-breeding ravens over years, investigating whether birds meet repeatedly either at the same or at different locations. We combined four large datasets: presence-absence observations from two study sites (Austria, Italy) and GPS-tracking of ravens across two study areas (Austria, France). As expected, we found a highly dynamic system in which individuals with long phases of temporary settlement had a high probability of meeting others. Although GPS-tagged ravens spread out over thousands of square kilometres, we found repeated associations between almost half of the possible combinations at different locations. Such a system makes repeated interactions between individuals at different sites possible and likely. High fission-fusion dynamics may thus not hinder but shape the social complexity of ravens and, possibly, other long-term bonded birds.

The Institutional Economics of Stakeholder Consultation: Reducing Implementations Costs Through 'Matching Zones'

This paper discusses various ways to organize these consultations, so that a compromise agreement is reached on the solution of the (re)distribution problem. These institutionalized structures of consultation are referred to as 'matching zones' here. Practical experiences, mainly from the Netherlands, provide guidelines for the effective institutional setup of such 'matching zones'. Specifically, the design of a 'matching zone' should try to adhere to the following principles: there should be a common interest and ample incentives for consensus; there should be the prospect of long, repeated interaction; there should be a balance between representation and efficiency; the constraints should be clear from the onset of the matching zone; fairness should be strived for; IC technology should be utilized optimally; and informal contacts and an amicable atmosphere should be promoted.

Vote Brokers, Clientelist Appeals, and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Russia and Venezuela

There is a large literature on the causes of clientelism, but few studies examine its effectiveness in turning out the vote. We compare the relative effectiveness of various clientelist brokers — party activists, employers, and other intermediaries — as well as the effectiveness of different types of selective inducements. Using framing experiments and direct questions placed on surveys in Venezuela and Russia, we find that respondents are most likely to respond to turnout appeals from employers. Employers have significant levers of influence over employees, are able to monitor voter behavior, and are engaged in repeated interactions with voters. This makes them effective vote brokers. We also find that negative inducements (e.g. threats and intimidation) outperform positive inducements (e.g. gifts and rewards), and that threats made to collectives resonated more strongly than those made to individuals. These results suggest that the clientelism literature could benefit by paying more attention to employers, negative inducements, and threats against organizations.