Indirect Reciprocity and Strategic Reputation Building in an Experimental Helping Game

We study indirect reciprocity and strategic reputation building in an experimental helping game. At any time only half of the subjects can build a reputation. This allows us to study both pure indirect reciprocity that is not contaminated by strategic reputation building and the impact of incentives for strategic reputation building on the helping rate. We find that while pure indirect reciprocity appears to be important, the helping choice seems to be influenced at least as much by strategic considerations. Strategic do better than non-strategic players and non-reciprocal do better than reciprocal players, casting doubt on previously proposed evolutionary explanations for indirect reciprocity.indirect reciprocity; reputation; experimental economics

Indirect Reciprocity and Strategic Reputation Building in an Experimental Helping Game

We study indirect reciprocity and strategic reputation building in an experimental helping game. At any time only half of the subjects can build a reputation. This allows us to study both pure indirect reciprocity that is not contaminated by strategic reputation building and the impact of incentives for strategic reputation building on the helping rate. We find that pure indirect reciprocity exists, but also that the helping decisions are substantially a!ected by strategic considerations. We find that the behavioral pattern can best be captured by non-selfish preferences as assumed by reciprocity models. Finally, we find that strategic do better than non-strategic players and non-reciprocal do better than reciprocal players, casting doubt on previously proposed evolutionary explanations for indirect reciprocity.indirect reciprocity, reputation, experimental economics

Indirect Reciprocity and Strategic Reputation Building in an Experimental Helping Game

We study indirect reciprocity and strategic reputation building in an experimental helping game. At any time only half of the subjects can build a reputation. This allows us to study both pure indirect reciprocity that is not contaminated by strategic reputation building and the impact of incentives for strategic reputation building on the helping rate. We find that while pure indirect reciprocity appears to be important, the helping choice seems to be influenced at least as much by strategic considerations. Strategic do better than non-strategic players and non-reciprocal do better than reciprocal players, casting doubt on previously proposed evolutionary explanations for indirect reciprocity

Indirect Reciprocity and Strategic Reputation Building in an Experimental Helping Game

We study indirect reciprocity and strategic reputation building in an experimental helping game. At any time only half of the subjects can build a reputation. This allows us to study both pure indirect reciprocity that is not contaminated by strategic reputation building and the impact of incentives for strategic reputation building on the helping rate. We find that while pure indirect reciprocity appears to be important, the helping choice seems to be influenced at least as much by strategic considerations. Strategic do better than non-strategic players and non-reciprocal do better than reciprocal players, casting doubt on previously proposed evolutionary explanations for indirect reciprocity

Measuring Indirect Reciprocity: Whose Back Do We Scratch?

This paper presents an experimental investigation of strong indirect reciprocity. We examine both generalized indirect reciprocity (if A helps B then B helps C) and social indirect reciprocity (if A helps B then C helps A), in a setting where reciprocal behavior cannot be explained by strategic motivations. We also consider a treatment for direct reciprocity, as a benchmark, and use a variant of the strategy method to control for di®erences in ¯rst movers' actions across treatments. We ¯nd evidence of strong reciprocity within each treatment, both for strategies and decisions. Generalized indirect reciprocity is found to be signi¯cantly stronger than social indirect reciprocity and, interestingly, direct reciprocity. This ¯nd- ing is interpreted as re°ecting the relevance of ¯rst movers' motivation for second movers' reciprocal behavior.Reciprocity, Experimental Economics.

Does Generosity Generate Generosity? An Experimental Study of Reputation Effects in a Dictator Game

This paper explores how information about paired subject's previous action affects one's own behavior in a dictator game. The first experiment puts dictators in two environments where they can either give money to the paired player or take money away from them: one where the recipient is a stranger and the other where the dictator has information on the recipient's reputation. Contrary to anecdotal evidence, the statistical tests show that the dictator's behavior toward a stranger is not statistically significantly different from their behavior toward an individual with an established reputation. The findings arise because a high proportion of dictators acted purely in their own self interest in both treatments. In the second experiment the dictators' choices were restricted to only generous actions. In such environment the dictators sent more money on average to recipients with a reputation for being generous than to recipients without a reputation.Experimental economics; dictator game; indirect reciprocity; reputation; generosity

The Effect of Motivations on Social Indirect Reciprocity: an Experimental Analysis

This paper investigates the effects of motivations on the perceived kindness of an action within the context of strong social indirect reci- procity. We test experimentally the hypothesis that, for a given dis- tributional outcome, an action is perceived by a third party to be less kind if it can be strategically motivated. The results do not support this hypothesis: social indirect reciprocity is indeed found to be signif- icantly stronger when strategic motivations cannot be ruled out. We interpret these findings as an indication of the role played by team reasoning in explaining reciprocal behavior.Indirect Reciprocity, Motivations, Social Preferences, Laboratory Experiments

Good standing and cooperation

Indirect reciprocity is generally considered one of the leading mechanisms to explain how cooperation may emerge by natural selection. The basic intuition is that establishing a reputation of being a helpful individual increases the probability of being in turn helped. Two models have been proposed to describe how indirect reciprocity may work: the standing model (Sugden, 1986/2004) and the image-scoring model (Nowak and Sigmund, 1998a,b). Although there is evidence that the former model would perform better under a wide set of circumstances, it is often maintained that it requires individuals with an implausibly large capacity of processing recursive information. In this paper I argue that this is not actually the case. I then suggest that the information needed by the image-scoring model, under reasonable assumptions, may be sufficient for the standing model to work. Finally I emphasize that even if the hypothesis of indirect reciprocity is unable to give a fair account of the ecological bases of cooperation, it has inspired a deal of research precious to social sciences.Cooperation, Indirect reciprocity, Good standing, Image-Scoring.

The nature of human altruism

Some of the most fundamental questions concerning our evolutionary origins, our social relations, and the organization of society are centred around issues of altruism and selfishness. Experimental evidence indicates that human altruism is a powerful force and is unique in the animal world. However, there is much individual heterogeneity and the interaction between altruists and selfish individuals is vital to human cooperation. Depending on the environment, a minority of altruists can force a majority of selfish individuals to cooperate or, conversely, a few egoists can induce a large number of altruists to defect. Current gene-based evolutionary theories cannot explain important patterns of human altruism, pointing towards the importance of both theories of cultural evolution as well as gene–culture co-evolution.altruism, selfishness, human altruism, evolution

Emergence of social networks via direct and indirect reciprocity

Many models of social network formation implicitly assume that network properties are static in steady-state. In contrast, actual social networks are highly dynamic: allegiances and collaborations expire and may or may not be renewed at a later date. Moreover, empirical studies show that human social networks are dynamic at the individual level but static at the global level: individuals' degree rankings change considerably over time, whereas network-level metrics such as network diameter and clustering coefficient are relatively stable. There have been some attempts to explain these properties of empirical social networks using agent-based models in which agents play social dilemma games with their immediate neighbours, but can also manipulate their network connections to strategic advantage. However, such models cannot straightforwardly account for reciprocal behaviour based on reputation scores ("indirect reciprocity"), which is known to play an important role in many economic interactions. In order to account for indirect reciprocity, we model the network in a bottom-up fashion: the network emerges from the low-level interactions between agents. By so doing we are able to simultaneously account for the effect of both direct reciprocity (e.g. "tit-for-tat") as well as indirect reciprocity (helping strangers in order to increase one's reputation). This leads to a strategic equilibrium in the frequencies with which strategies are adopted in the population as a whole, but intermittent cycling over different strategies at the level of individual agents, which in turn gives rise to social networks which are dynamic at the individual level but stable at the network level