Coalition Formation in a Legislative Voting Game

We experimentally investigate the Jackson-Moselle (2002) model where legislators bargain over policy proposals and the allocation of private goods. Key comparative static predictions of the model hold as policy proposals shift in the predicted direction with private goods, with the variance in policy outcomes increasing as well. Private goods increase total welfare even after accounting for their cost and help secure legislative compromise. Coalition formations are better characterized by an efficient equal split between coalition partners than the stationary subgame perfect equilibrium prediction

Promote cooperation by localised small-world communication

The emergence and maintenance of cooperation within sizable groups of unrelated humans offer many challenges for our understanding. We propose that the humans' capacity of communication, such as how many and how far away the fellows can build up mutual communications, may affect the evolution of cooperation. We study this issue by means of the public goods game (PGG) with a two-layered network of contacts. Players obtain payoffs from five-person public goods interactions on a square lattice (the interaction layer). Also, they update strategies after communicating with neighbours in learning layer, where two players build up mutual communication with a power law probability depending on their spatial distance. Our simulation results indicate that the evolution of cooperation is indeed sensitive to how players choose others to communicate with, including the amount as well as the locations. The tendency of localised communication is proved to be a new mechanism to promote cooperation.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Effects of inhomogeneous activity of players and noise on cooperation in spatial public goods games

We study the public goods game in the noisy case by considering the players with inhomogeneous activity teaching on a square lattice. It is shown that the introduction of the inhomogeneous activity of teaching of the players can remarkably promote cooperation. By investigating the effects of noise on cooperative behavior in detail, we find that the variation of cooperator density $\rho_C$ with the noise parameter $\kappa$ displays several different behaviors: $\rho_C$ monotonically increases (decreases) with $\kappa$; $\rho_C$ firstly increases (decreases) with $\kappa$ and then it decreases (increases) monotonically after reaching its maximum (minimum) value, which depends on the amount of the multiplication factor $r$, on whether the system is homogeneous or inhomogeneous, and on whether the adopted updating is synchronous or asynchronous. These results imply that the noise plays an important and nontrivial role in the evolution of cooperation.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

A failure to communicate: an experimental investigation of the effects of advice on strategic play

We investigate why two person teams beat the truth wins benchmark in signaling games (Cooper and Kagel, 2005, 2009) by studying an advice treatment where advisees have the benefit of two individuals׳ insight but not bilateral communication. The TW benchmark states that the performance of a team for problems with a demonstrable correct solution should be no worse than the performance of its most able individual. If one individual solves the problem, the team solves it as well. Advisees whose advisors play strategically have significantly higher levels of strategic play, but fall well short of the truth wins benchmark as (i) many advisors who play strategically do not provide advice to this effect, and (ii) many advisees fail to follow sound advice. Effect (i) is largely attributable to female advisors who are far less likely to provide advice than men. Whether or not advice contains a clear explanation for its effectiveness has no effect on the likelihood of advisees’ strategic play, a result at odds with the idea that economic agents regularly consider all the available alternatives

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

Community projects: an experimental analysis of a fair implementation process

We define and experimentally test a public provision mechanism that meets three basic ethical requirements and allows community members to influence, via monetary bids, which of several projects is implemented. For each project, participants are assigned personal values, which can be positive or negative. We provide either public or private information about personal values. This produces two distinct public provision games, which are experimentally implemented and analyzed for various projects. In spite of the complex experimental task, participants do not rely on bidding their own personal values as an obvious simple heuristic whose general acceptance would result in fair and efficient outcomes. Rather, they rely on strategic underbidding. Although underbidding is affected by projects’ characteristics, the provision mechanism mostly leads to the implementation of the most efficient project