Cooperation Among Strangers with Limited Information About Reputation
By Gary E. Bolton, Elena Katok, Axel Ockenfels. 2005
283 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The amount of institutional intervention necessary to secure efficiency-enhancing cooperation in markets and organizations, in circumstances where interactions take place among essentially strangers, depends critically on the amount of information informal reputation mechanisms need transmit. Models based on subgame perfection find that the information necessary to support cooperation is recursive in nature and thus information generating and processing requirements are quite demanding. Models that do not rely on subgame perfection, on the other hand, suggest that the information demands may be quite modest. The experiment we present indicates that even without any reputation information there is a non-negligible amount of cooperation that is, however, quite sensitive to the cooperation costs. For high costs, providing information about a partner's immediate past action increases cooperation. Recursive information about the partners' previous partners' reputation further promotes cooperation, regardless of the cooperation costs.
Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/123a96671f49b6179e323c75cd78a526c57e4b3b
Citations in the corpus
- Imperfect Public Monitoring with Costly Punishment - An Experimental Study (2012, unknown): “Earlier experimental papers that investigate manipulating players’ information in repeated games in less standard ways (such as presenting information with delay, or in a cognitively more complex manner) include Kahn and Murnighan (1993), Cason and Khan (1999), Sainty (1999) and Bolton et al. (2005)”
- Recordkeeping and Human Evolution (2006, unknown): “That is, hard external records allow exchange parties to mutually track performance in transactions involving future obligations, which is critical in sustaining cooperation in repeated interactions among initially complete strangers who can develop reputations ( Bolton et al. 2005 ).12”