Repeated Play, Cooperation and Coordination: An Experimental Study
- Creators
-
Palfrey, Thomas R.
- Rosenthal, Howard
Abstract
An experiment was conducted to test whether discounted repeated play leads to greater cooperation and coordination than one-shot play, in a public good environment with incomplete information. The experiment was designed so that, theoretically repeated play can sustain equilibria with higher group earnings than result in the one-shot Bayesian Nash equilibrium. The design varied a number of environment al parameters, including the size of the group, the marginal rate of transformation between the public and private good, and the statistical distribution of marginal rates of substitution between the public and private good. Marginal rates of substitution were private information but the statistical distribution was common knowledge. The results indicate that repetition leads to greater cooperation, and that the magnitude of these gains depends both on the ability of players to monitor each other's strategy and on the underlying environmental parameters.
Additional Information
The authors are thankful for the research support of the National Science Foundation through grants #SES-8718650 and #SES-9011828. The research assistance of Mark Fey, Jessica Goodfellow, and Jeff Prisbrey is gratefully acknowledged for their help in conducting the experiments. Sanjay Srivastava was instrumental in developing the computer network used for the experiments. Work on this paper proceeded while Rosenthal was a Fellow at the International Centre for Economic Research and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science. He is grateful for financial support provided by National Science Foundation #BNS-8700864 during his stay at CASBS.Attached Files
Submitted - sswp785.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 80966
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170830-132920230
- SES-8718650
- NSF
- SES-9011828
- NSF
- BNS-8700864
- NSF
- Created
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2017-08-30Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2019-11-22Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Social Science Working Papers
- Series Name
- Social Science Working Paper
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 785