Slow to Anger and Fast to Forgive: Cooperation in an Uncertain World

By Drew Fudenberg, David G. Rand, Anna Dreber. 2012

366 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the experimental play of the repeated prisoner's dilemma when intended actions are implemented with noise. In treatments where cooperation is an equilibrium, subjects cooperate substantially more than in treatments without cooperative equilibria. In all settings there was considerable strategic diversity, indicating that subjects had not fully learned the distribution of play. Furthermore, cooperative strategies yielded higher payoffs than uncooperative strategies in the treatments with cooperative equilibria. In these treatments successful strategies were "lenient" in not retaliating for the first defection, and many were "forgiving" in trying to return to cooperation after inflicting a punishment. (JEL C72, C73, D81)

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/740b64b26b490e3e8551a5b1c1a86505cdaf21bf

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Playing repeated games with large language models (2023, neutral): “How do LLMs behave in these repeated social interactions? Measuring how people behave in repeated interactions, for example, how they cooperate [Fudenberg et al., 2012] and coordinate [Mailath and Morris, 2004], is the subject of a sub-field of behavioral economics called behavioral game theory [Cam”
Maintaining cooperation in complex social dilemmas using deep reinforcement learning (2017, background): “There is a large literature using the repeated PD to study human decision-making in social dilemmas (Fudenberg et al., 2012; Bó & Fréchette, 2011).”
Spontaneous giving and calculated greed (2012, background): “Cooperation in stochastically repeated PD with execution errors (data from Fudenberg et al 2012 AER).”
Intelligence, Personality, and Gains from Cooperation in Repeated Interactions (2019, background): “Gottfredson, L. S. (1997). Why g matters: The complexity of everyday life, Intelligence 24(1): 79–132.”
Why We Cooperate (2014, background): “…players to adopt strategies which are lenient (i.e. that wait for multiple defections before switching to defection themselves) and forgiving (i.e. that are willing to return to cooperation after periods of defection) (Dreber, Fudenberg, & Rand, 2014; Fudenberg et al., 2012; Rand et al., 2013).”