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Exp Econ (2007) 10:320 DOI 10.1007/s10683-006-9139-8
The rise of cooperation in correlated matching prisoners dilemma: An experiment
Chun-Lei Yang Ching-Syang Jack Yue I-Tang Yu
Received: 20 April 2004 / Revised: 23 December 2005 / Accepted: 24 February 2006 / Published online: 8 February 2007
C Economic Science Association 2007
Abstract Recently, there has been a Renaissance for multi-level selection models to explain the persistence of unselsh behavior in social dilemmas, in which assortative/correlated matching plays an important role. In the current study of a multi-round prisoners dilemma experiment, we introduce two correlated matching procedures that match subjects with similar action histories together. We discover signicant treatment effects, compared to the control procedure of random matching. Particularly with the weighted history matching procedure we nd bifurcations regarding group outcomes. Some groups converge to the all-defection equilibrium even more pronouncedly than the control groups do, while other groups generate much higher rate of cooperation, which is also associated with higher relative reward for a typical cooperative action. All in all, the data show that cooperation does have a much better chance to persist in a correlated/assortative-matching environment, as predicted in the literature.
Keywords Prisoners dilemma . Cooperation . Experiment . Unselsh behavior . Evolution . Assortative matching . Correlated matching . Multi-level selection
JEL Classication B52, C91, D74
Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-006-9139-8.
C.-L. Yang ([envelopeback])
Research Center for Humanity and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Rd. Sec. 2, Taipei 115, Taiwan, ROCe-mail: [email protected]
C.-S. Jack YueDepartment of Statistics, National Chengchi University, 64 Chi-Nan Rd. Sec. 2, Taipei 11623, Taiwan, ROC
I-T. YuDepartment of Statistics, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan, ROC
Springer
4 C.-L. Yang et al.
1 Introduction
Cooperation in social dilemma situations like the prisoners dilemma (PD), both in human societies and primitive species, has been a puzzle for philosophers, social scientists, and biologists alike. Assuming rationality and sufcient sophistication, cooperation can be sustained as a result of reciprocal actions in the context of 2-person repeated PD games, as argued in Trivers (1971), Axelrod and Hamilton (1981), and Kreps et al. (1982), which in some cases can be evolutionarily stable as shown by Fudenberg and Maskin (1990) and Binmore and Samuelson (1992). The same...