Split or Steal? Cooperative Behavior When the Stakes Are Large

We examine cooperative behavior when large sums of money are at stake, using data from the television game show Golden Balls. At the end of each episode, contestants play a variant on the classic prisoner's dilemma for large and widely ranging stakes averaging over $20,000. Cooperation is surprisingly high for amounts that would normally be considered consequential but look tiny in their current context, what we call a “big peanuts” phenomenon. Utilizing the prior interaction among contestants, we find evidence that people have reciprocal preferences. Surprisingly, there is little support for conditional cooperation in our sample. That is, players do not seem to be more likely to cooperate if their opponent might be expected to cooperate. Further, we replicate earlier findings that males are less cooperative than females, but this gender effect reverses for older contestants because men become increasingly cooperative as their age increases

Correlates of Cooperation in a One-Shot High-Stakes Televised Prisoners' Dilemma

Explaining cooperation between non-relatives is a puzzle for both evolutionary biology and the social sciences. In humans, cooperation is often studied in a laboratory setting using economic games such as the prisoners' dilemma. However, such experiments are sometimes criticized for being played for low stakes and by misrepresentative student samples. Golden balls is a televised game show that uses the prisoners' dilemma, with a diverse range of participants, often playing for very large stakes. We use this non-experimental dataset to investigate the factors that influence cooperation when “playing” for considerably larger stakes than found in economic experiments. The game show has earlier stages that allow for an analysis of lying and voting decisions. We found that contestants were sensitive to the stakes involved, cooperating less when the stakes were larger in both absolute and relative terms. We also found that older contestants were more likely to cooperate, that liars received less cooperative behavior, but only if they told a certain type of lie, and that physical contact was associated with reduced cooperation, whereas laughter and promises were reliable signals or cues of cooperation, but were not necessarily detected

Determinants of Successful Cooperation in a Face-to-Face Social Dilemma

What makes you a successful cooperator? Using data from the British television game show "Golden Balls" we analyze a prisoner's dilemma game and its pre-play. We find that players strategically select their partner for the PD, e.g., they bear in mind whether contestants lied. Players' expectations about the stake size strongly influence the outcome of the PD: The lower the stakes, the more likely players successfully cooperate. Most interestingly, unilateral cooperation is encouraged by mutually promising not to defect and shaking hands on it, but a mere handshake serves as manipulating device and increases successful defection.prisoner's dilemma, cooperative behavior, communication, promises, voting

Essays in Behavioral Economics: Lying and Deception

The U.S. economy loses hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues, wages, and investment dollars, as well as hundreds of thousands of jobs each year due to dishonest behavior (Mazar and Ariely, 2006; Griffin et al., 2022). Thus, understanding dishonest behavior and finding mechanism to effectively reduce dishonest behavior are of great relevance to policy makers and the economy in general. This dissertation studies deceptive behavior and the relevant factors using online experiment, observational data, and field experiment in three chapters, respectively. Chapter 1 studies the effect of interaction with a machine (voicebot) on dishonest reporting. We conducted an online experiment using a coin-toss task and compared reported outcomes across different reporting channels: Human Voice, Voicebot, and Text. We designed a uniform online voice chat interface to standardize the reporting experience. We also tested the effect of a feminine and a masculine voice on misreporting and varied the level of sophistication of the voicebot (AI-enhanced voicebot). Our results show that, on average, there is no significant difference in the likelihood of misreporting through a voicebot and a human voice, or between verbal and written reporting. However, we found that participants who listened to a feminine voice were more likely to lie than those who listened to a masculine voice. Moreover, those who heard a feminine voice were more likely to lie to a voicebot than a human voice. Interestingly, such difference disappears with higher sophistication (i.e., AI-enhanced voicebot). In contrast, when hearing a masculine voice, there was no difference in misreporting between the voicebot and human voice treatments. These findings suggest that utilizing a masculine voice for voicebots or voicebots with higher sophistication and feminine voice could help deter or diminish dishonest reporting in human-machine interactions. Chapter 2 focuses on lying detection from voice analysis. We use video clips from the British TV game show “Golden Balls”, where the contestants play a prisoner’s dilemma game with pre-play communication and from “Real-life Trial” (RT) data, which consist of videos collected from public court trials. We first apply machine learning model to predict the cooperative and deceptive behaviors from acoustic features. We then identify which acoustic features are associated with cooperation or deception. Our machine learning models achieve an average prediction accuracy from 58% to 79%. This suggests that acoustic features are effective in predicting cooperation and deception. We also find that the pitch (fundamental frequency) is positively associated with both cooperation and deception in different contexts. The intonation (the standard deviation of pitch) is negatively associated with deception. In chapter 3, we examine dishonest behavior using a field experiment. We hypothesize that clothes can affect the behavior of the wearer by influencing the person’s identity. We test this hypothesis by recruiting trick-or-treaters during Halloween, a time of year when people wear salient and extreme clothing. We use the lying game of Fischbacher and Föllmi–Heusi as our experimental paradigm with 2 × 3 × 2 conditions. First, we vary the stakes to price lying behavior. Second, we run three conditions with different beneficiaries of the report (self, other, and both) to test whether lying for others is perceived to be normative. Third, we manipulate the salience of one’s costume to test the effect of costume and identity on ethical behavior. Surprisingly, we find that costume salience caused “good guys” to lie more and “bad guys” to lie less. We interpret this either as a moral licensing effect or as stemming from a perception of being monitored. Our design allows for the identification of contagion effects, and although there were no direct effects of gender, we find that children lie more when children of the same gender near them lie more. We also find that stakes had no effect, people lied more for themselves than for others, and lying has an inverted-U pattern over age, peaking at age 12

How Lies Induced Cooperation in "Golden Balls:" A Game-Theoretic Analysis

We analyze a particular episode of a popular British TV game show, “Golden Balls,” in which one of the two contestants lied about what he intended to do, which had the salutary effect of inducing both contestants to cooperate in what is normally a Prisoners' Dilemma (PD), wherein one or both contestants usually defected. This “solution” to PD assumes that the liar desired to be honorable in fulfilling his pledge to split the jackpot if he won but, surprisingly, he achieved this end without having to do so, astonishing the audience and receiving its acclaim. We note that this action has a biblical precedent in King Solomon’s decision to cut a baby in two

How Lies Induced Cooperation in "Golden Balls:" A Game-Theoretic Analysis

We analyze a particular episode of a popular British TV game show, “Golden Balls,” in which one of the two contestants lied about what he intended to do, which had the salutary effect of inducing both contestants to cooperate in what is normally a Prisoners' Dilemma (PD), wherein one or both contestants usually defected. This “solution” to PD assumes that the liar desired to be honorable in fulfilling his pledge to split the jackpot if he won but, surprisingly, he achieved this end without having to do so, astonishing the audience and receiving its acclaim. We note that this action has a biblical precedent in King Solomon’s decision to cut a baby in two