Cooperation over finite horizons: a theory and experiments

By Attila Ambrus, Parag A. Pathak. 2011

101 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper shows that the presence of different types of players – those who only care about their own material payoffs and those who reciprocate others' contributions – can explain the robust features of observed contribution patterns in public good contribution games, even without the presence of asymmetric information. We show what conditions on reciprocity are sufficient for a unique perfect equilibrium, in which contributions are decreasing. Under these conditions, selfish players have enough future benefits to induce subsequent contributions by reciprocal players, and this incentive diminishes as the end of the game approaches. The model explains the puzzling restart effect and is consistent with various other empirical findings. We also report the results of a series of experiments, using a probabilistic continuation design in which after each set of 10-period games, the group is restarted with low probability. We find specific support for the theory in our data, including that selfish players (identified exogenously) stop contributing earlier than reciprocal players, as directly implied by the model.

Subfields: Demography, Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64ba1f182bca407c5196e16fb2824d2fd2cc5f4c

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Citations in the corpus

The behavioral validity of the strategy method in public good experiments (2012, background): “See also Ambrus and Pathak (2011) and Reuben and Suetens (2012) for recent studies on strategic cooperation. 11 See Fischbacher and Gächter (2010) for a complementary analysis of this observation, which does, however, not distinguish between preference types.”
Sustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: a selective survey of the literature (2011, background): “A recent theoretical paper by Ambrus and Pathak (2009) extends the earlier”
Whatever you say, your reputation precedes you: Observation and cheap talk in the trust game (2009, result): “If the instructions had attempted to make clear 18Our results are also consistent with Ambrus and Pathak (2007), who show that under certain conditions, a mixed population containing both selfish money–maximizers and reciprocators can yield dynamics that include declining rates of cooperation and…”