Cooperation Survives and Cheating Pays in a Dynamic Network Structure with Unreliable Reputation

In a networked society like ours, reputation is an indispensable tool to guide decisions about social or economic interactions with individuals otherwise unknown. Usually, information about prospective counterparts is incomplete, often being limited to an average success rate. Uncertainty on reputation is further increased by fraud, which is increasingly becoming a cause of concern. To address these issues, we have designed an experiment based on the Prisoner's Dilemma as a model for social interactions. Participants could spend money to have their observable cooperativeness increased. We find that the aggregate cooperation level is practically unchanged, i.e., global behavior does not seem to be affected by unreliable reputations. However, at the individual level we find two distinct types of behavior, one of reliable subjects and one of cheaters, where the latter artificially fake their reputation in almost every interaction.A. A. gratefully acknowledges financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation (under grants no. 200020-143224, CR13I1-138032 and P2LAP1-161864) and by the Rectors’ Conference of the Swiss Universities (under grant no. 26058983). All authors acknowledge financial support to carry out the experiments by the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne and the fundamental support by Prof. Rafael Lalive. This work has been supported in part by the European Commission through FET Open RIA 662725 (IBSEN) and by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain) under grant FIS2015-64349-P (VARIANCE)

Sind mehr als zwei Pfennig wirklich zuviel Wettbewerbstheoretische Aspekte der Missbrauchsaufsicht ueber Autobahntankstellen

Bibliothek Weltwirtschaft Kiel C137344 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman

A comparative analysis of spatial Prisoner's Dilemma experiments: conditional cooperation and payoff irrelevance.

We have carried out a comparative analysis of data collected in three experiments on Prisoner's Dilemmas on lattices available in the literature. We focus on the different ways in which the behavior of human subjects can be interpreted, in order to empirically narrow down the possibilities for behavioral rules. Among the proposed update dynamics, we find that the experiments do not provide significant evidence for non-innovative game dynamics such as imitate-the-best or pairwise comparison rules, whereas moody conditional cooperation is supported by the data from all three experiments. This conclusion questions the applicability of many theoretical models that have been proposed to understand human behavior in spatial Prisoner's Dilemmas. A rule compatible with all our experiments, moody conditional cooperation, suggests that there is no detectable influence of interaction networks on the emergence of cooperation in behavioral experiments.peerReviewe