Cooperation in an Assortative Matching Prisoners Dilemma Experiment with Pro-Social Dummies

Assortative matching (AM) can be theoretically an effective means to facilitate cooperation. We designed a controlled lab experiment with three treatments on multi-round prisoner’s dilemma. With matching based on weighted history (WH) as surrogate for AM, we show that adding pro-social dummies to th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inScientific reports Vol. 9; no. 1; pp. 13609 - 8
Main Authors Yang, Chun-Lei, Yue, Ching-Syang Jack
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Nature Publishing Group UK 20.09.2019
Nature Publishing Group
Subjects
631/158/857
631/181/2468
Cooperation
Humanities and Social Sciences
multidisciplinary
Prisoner's dilemma
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
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Summary:Assortative matching (AM) can be theoretically an effective means to facilitate cooperation. We designed a controlled lab experiment with three treatments on multi-round prisoner’s dilemma. With matching based on weighted history (WH) as surrogate for AM, we show that adding pro-social dummies to the WH treatment may significantly improve cooperation, compared to both the random matching and the WH treatment. In society where assortative matching is effective and promoted by the underlying culture, institutional promotion of virtue role models can be interpreted as generating additional pro-social dummies, so as to move the initial state of cooperators into the basin of attraction for a highly cooperative polymorphic equilibrium.
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ISSN:2045-2322
2045-2322
DOI:10.1038/s41598-019-50083-6