Browsing by Subject "cooperation"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Open Access
A Strategic Model of Magical Thinking: Axioms and Analysis
(Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID) Working Paper, 2014-09-26) Sadowski, P; Daley, B
This paper seeks to make two contributions. First, we propose and analyze a tractable model of strategic play in which players behave as if their expectations about their opponents' behavior vary with their own choices. We refer to this nonstandard updating as magical thinking. The model provides a unified view of documented behavior in a range of often-studied games, such as the Prisoners' Dilemma, the Battle of the Sexes, Hawk-Dove, and the Stag Hunt. Second, we provide axioms applied to the behavior of the collection of players in symmetric 2x2 games, and a representation theorem that establishes these axioms to be the precise behavioral content of the model. We thereby suggest a novel way to import the axiomatic methodology of individual decision theory to strategic settings and demonstrate the benefits of this approach. In the model, the degree to which players exhibit magical thinking is heterogeneous in the population and is captured by players' types. All players perceive types to be i.i.d. draws from a common distribution. We show that the model's parameters, namely these individual types and the commonly perceived distribution, can be (essentially) identified from behavior in games, allowing for tractable comparative statics. Finally, the model generates novel predictions across games. For example, the ability of a collection of players to coordinate on Pareto superior Nash equilibria in coordination games is positively correlated with their degree of cooperation in Prisoners' Dilemma games. The supplement for this paper are available at the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2507394
Open Access
Chimpanzees return favors at a personal cost.
(Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2017-06-19) Schmelz, Martin; Grueneisen, Sebastian; Kabalak, Alihan; Jost, Jürgen; Tomasello, Michael
Humans regularly provide others with resources at a personal cost to themselves. Chimpanzees engage in some cooperative behaviors in the wild as well, but their motivational underpinnings are unclear. In three experiments, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) always chose between an option delivering food both to themselves and a partner and one delivering food only to themselves. In one condition, a conspecific partner had just previously taken a personal risk to make this choice available. In another condition, no assistance from the partner preceded the subject's decision. Chimpanzees made significantly more prosocial choices after receiving their partner's assistance than when no assistance was given (experiment 1) and, crucially, this was the case even when choosing the prosocial option was materially costly for the subject (experiment 2). Moreover, subjects appeared sensitive to the risk of their partner's assistance and chose prosocially more often when their partner risked losing food by helping (experiment 3). These findings demonstrate experimentally that chimpanzees are willing to incur a material cost to deliver rewards to a conspecific, but only if that conspecific previously assisted them, and particularly when this assistance was risky. Some key motivations involved in human cooperation thus may have deeper phylogenetic roots than previously suspected.
Open Access
Concern for Group Reputation Increases Prosociality in Young Children.
(Psychol Sci, 2018-02) Engelmann, Jan M; Herrmann, Esther; Tomasello, Michael
The motivation to build and maintain a positive personal reputation promotes prosocial behavior. But individuals also identify with their groups, and so it is possible that the desire to maintain or enhance group reputation may have similar effects. Here, we show that 5-year-old children actively invest in the reputation of their group by acting more generously when their group's reputation is at stake. Children shared significantly more resources with fictitious other children not only when their individual donations were public rather than private but also when their group's donations (effacing individual donations) were public rather than private. These results provide the first experimental evidence that concern for group reputation can lead to higher levels of prosociality.
Open Access
Foundations for Cooperation in the Prisoners’ Dilemma
(Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID) Working Paper, 2014-05-07) Daley, B; Sadowski, P
We provide axiomatic foundations for a simple model of play in prisoners' dilemma games. The model accommodates cooperation and suggests that players behave as if their expectations about their opponents' behavior vary with their own choice. We refer to this nonstandard updating as magical thinking. The degree to which players exhibit magical thinking may be heterogeneous in the population and is captured by a uniquely identifi ed parameter for each player. Further, it is as if all players perceive these parameters to be i.i.d. draws from a common distribution. The model's identi fication allows for tractable comparative statics. We investigate how our theory extends to all symmetric 2x2 games. The Supplement for this paper are available at the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2331585
Open Access
Motivating children's cooperation to conserve forests.
(Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, 2022-04-18) Bowie, Aleah; Zhou, Wen; Tan, Jingzhi; White, Philip; Stoinski, Tara; Su, Yanjie; Hare, Brian
Forests are essential common-pool resources. Understanding children's and adolescents' motivations for conservation is critical to improving conservation education. In 2 experiments, we investigated 1086 school-aged children and adolescents (6-16 years old) from China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the United States. testING participants in groups, we assessed their motivation for conservation based on collective-risk common-pool goods games in which they are threatened with losing their endowment unless the group donation exceeds a threshold needed to maintain the forest.eExtrinsic motivations, rather than intrinsic , tended to lead to successful cooperation to maintain a forest. Certainty of losing individual payoffs significantly boosted successful cooperative conservation efforts across cultures (success rates were 90.63 % and 74.19% in the 2 risk-extrinsic conditions and 43.75% in the control condition). In U.S. participants, 2 extrinsic incentives, priming discussions of the value of forests and delay of payoffs as punishment , also increased success of cooperative conservation (success rates were 97.22% and 76.92% in the 2 extrinsic-incentive conditions and 29.19% and 30.77% in the 2 control conditions). Conservation simulations, like those we used, may allow educators to encourage forest protection by leading groups to experience successful cooperation and the extrinsic incentives needed to motivate forest conservation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Open Access
Supplement to a Strategic Model of Magical Thinking: Axioms and Analysis
(Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID) Working Paper, 2014-09-26) Sadowski, P; Daley, B
We establish that in the Prisoners' Dilemma, the model of Daley and Sadowski (2014) is logically distinct from three models that employ well-known forms of other-regarding preferences: altruism (Ledyard, 1995; Levine, 1998), inequity aversion (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999), and reciprocity (Rabin, 1993). The paper "A Strategic Model of Magical Thinking: Axioms and Analysis" to which this supplement applies is available at the following URL: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2507377