On Smiles, Winks, and Handshakes as Coordination Devices

In an experimental study we examine a variant of the 'minimum effort game', a coordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria, and risk considerations pointing to the least efficient equilibrium.We focus on the question whether simple cues such as smiles, winks and handshakes could be recognized and employed by the players as a tell-tale sign of each other's trustworthiness, thus enabling them to coordinate on the more risky but more rewarding Pareto efficient equilibrium.Our experimental results show that such cues may indeed play a role as coordination devices as their information value is significant and substantial.game theory;trust

On Smiles, Winks, and Handshakes as Coordination Devices

In an experimental study we examine a variant of the 'minimum effort game' , a coordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria, and risk considerations pointing to the least efficient equilibrium. We focus on the question whether simple cues such as smiles, winks and handshakes could be recognized and employed by the players as a tell-tale sign of each other's trustworthiness , thus enabling them to coordinate on the more risky but more rewarding Pareto efficient equilibrium. Our experimental results show that such cues may indeed play a role as coordination devices as their information value is significant and substantial.Coordination games, Pareto efficiency, Trust, Cues, Signals

Probabilistic sharing solves the problem of costly punishment

Cooperators that refuse to participate in sanctioning defectors create the second-order free-rider problem. Such cooperators will not be punished because they contribute to the public good, but they also eschew the costs associated with punishing defectors. Altruistic punishers - those that cooperate and punish - are at a disadvantage, and it is puzzling how such behaviour has evolved. We show that sharing the responsibility to sanction defectors rather than relying on certain individuals to do so permanently can solve the problem of costly punishment. Inspired by the fact that humans have strong but also emotional tendencies for fair play, we consider probabilistic sanctioning as the simplest way of distributing the duty. In well-mixed populations the public goods game is transformed into a coordination game with full cooperation and defection as the two stable equilibria, while in structured populations pattern formation supports additional counterintuitive solutions that are reminiscent of Parrondo's paradox.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in New Journal of Physic

Antisocial punishment in two social dilemmas

The effect of sanctions on cooperation depends on social and cultural norms. While free riding is kept at bay by altruistic punishment in certain cultures, antisocial punishment carried out by free riders pushes back cooperation in others. In this paper we analyze sanctions in both a standard public goods game with a linear production function and an otherwise identical social dilemma in which the minimum contribution determines the group outcome. Experiments were run in a culture with traditionally high antisocial punishment (Southern Europe). We replicate the detrimental effect of antisocial sanctions on cooperation in the linear case. However, we find that punishment is still widely effective when actions are complementary: the provision of the public good significantly and substantially increases with sanctions, participants punish significantly less and sanctions radically transform conditional cooperation patterns to generate significant welfare gains

An evolved cognitive bias for social norms

Social norms are a widely used concept for explaining human behavior, but there are few studies exploring how we cognitively utilize them. We incorporate here an evolutionary approach to studying social norms, predicting that if norms have been critical to biological fitness, then individuals should have adaptive mechanisms to conform to, and avoid violating, norms. A cognitive bias toward norms is one specific means by which individuals could achieve this. To test this, we assessed whether individuals have greater recall for normative information than for nonnormative information. Three experiments were performed in which participants read a text and were then tested on their recall of behavioral content. The data suggest that individuals have superior recall for normative social information and that performance is not related to rated importance. We discuss how such a cognitive bias may ontogenetically develop and identify possible hypotheses that distinguish between alternative explanatory accounts for social norms