Cooperative Behavior and the Frequency of Social Interaction

合作行为和社交互动的频率

• 批准号: 0213658
• 负责人: Jack Ochs
• 金额: $ 6.52万
• 依托单位: University of Pittsburgh
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-08-01 至 2005-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0213658&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Cooperative; Behavior; Frequency; Social; Interaction

Cooperation may be in everyone's long-term interest, but in any single social interaction each individual may have an incentive to defect from cooperative behavior. This is the essence of social dilemmas. When individuals are paired in an indefinitely long-term relationship, the threat of triggering non-cooperative responses by others to a non-cooperative act may be sufficient to sustain cooperative behavior. However, individuals may live in a community for a long time, frequently interact with various members of that community, but have only short-term, intermittent, relationships with any particular member of that community. In such circumstances, it is not be possible for the victim of an opportunistic act to directly punish the defector. Nevertheless, Kandori has shown that, under certain conditions, a social norm of cooperative behavior can be sustained by the same kind of history-dependent strategies that can sustain cooperative behavior in long-term relationships between fixed pairs of individuals. Kandori's theorem is an extension of the Folk Theorem for infinitely repeated games. Like the Folk Theorem, it only proves that cooperation can be sustained by history-dependent trigger strategies. Whether, and under what conditions a group will develop a social norm of cooperative behavior are the questions this study addresses. Specifically, a behavioral experiment has been designed to investigate the degree to which cooperative behavior in an indefinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma stage game is influenced by both the nature of the matching technology and the character of the information transmitted about the play of one stage game to the players of the next stage game. The study will compare the extent of cooperative behavior observed when fixed pairs play an indefinitely repeated Prisoners' Dilemma stage game with that observed in a fixed group that is anonymously and randomly matched after each stage game. In the random matching condition, the amount of information that players have concerning their opponent's past behavior will also be varied so as to determine whether more information leads to increases in the frequency of cooperative behavior.The question of what kinds of social interaction promote or inhibit cooperative (competitive) behavior in environments where agents have both incentives to cooperate over time and incentives to opportunistically compete at any particular moment of time is of obvious importance in many settings where cooperative arrangements must be self-enforcing. These include such diverse settings as the design of test-ban treaties, the design of relative performance pay systems, and the administration of anti-trust laws to deal with implicit collusion. Beyond these matters of practical importance, the results of this experiment are also of methodological importance for experimental economists who often use random matching protocols to study learning behavior in strategic situations that are meant to represent one time encounters. .

合作可能符合每个人的长期利益，但在任何单一的社会互动中，每个人都可能有背离合作行为的动机。这就是社会困境的本质。当个体在一段不确定的长期关系中配对时，引发他人对非合作行为作出非合作反应的威胁可能足以维持合作行为。然而，个体可能在一个社区中生活很长时间，经常与该社区的各种成员互动，但与该社区的任何特定成员只有短期的，间歇性的关系。在这种情况下，机会主义行为的受害者不可能直接惩罚叛逃者。然而，Kandori已经证明，在某些条件下，合作行为的社会规范可以通过同样的历史依赖策略来维持，这种策略可以在固定的个体对之间的长期关系中维持合作行为。Kandori定理是Folk定理在无限重复博弈中的推广。与民间定理一样，它只证明了依赖历史的触发策略可以维持合作。是否，以及在什么条件下，一个群体将发展合作行为的社会规范是本研究要解决的问题。具体来说，我们设计了一个行为实验来研究在无限重复囚徒困境阶段博弈中，合作行为在多大程度上受到匹配技术的性质和从一个阶段博弈传递给下一个阶段博弈参与者的信息的性质的影响。该研究将比较固定的两组参与者在无限重复的囚徒困境阶段游戏中观察到的合作行为程度，以及在每个阶段游戏后匿名随机配对的固定组中观察到的合作行为程度。在随机匹配条件下，参与者对其对手过去行为的信息量也会发生变化，从而决定更多的信息是否会导致合作行为的频率增加。在这样的环境中，什么类型的社会互动促进或抑制合作（竞争）行为？在这样的环境中，行为主体既有长期合作的动机，也有在任何特定时刻进行机会主义竞争的动机。其中包括设计禁试条约、设计相对绩效薪酬制度，以及执行反托拉斯法以处理隐性串通等各种不同的设置。除了这些具有实际重要性的问题之外，该实验的结果对于经常使用随机匹配协议来研究旨在代表一次性遭遇的战略情境中的学习行为的实验经济学家来说也具有方法论上的重要性。