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

Golden balls: A prisoner's dilemma experiment

We analyze cooperative behavior in a prisoner's dilemma game with high stakes, face-to-face communication, and two rounds of pre-play in which the two final contestants are endogenously selected via a voting process. Using data from the British television game show 'Golden Balls', we find a unilateral cooperation rate of 55% and a mutual cooperation rate of 33%. The stake size is on average $13,300 and ranges from$3 to $100,150. Our analysis shows that both stake size and communication have a significant impact on the player's likelihood to cooperate. In particular, we observe a negative correlation between stake size and cooperation. Also certain gestures, as handshakes, decrease the likelihood to cooperate. But, if players mutually promise each other to cooperate and in addition shake hands on it, the cooperation rate increases. We also show that a player's expectation about the stake size matters. Further, we find a strong link between contestant's pre-play behavior and the outcome of the prisoner's dilemma. Players who contribute more to the stake size are less likely to cooperate, even though each player's contribution is determined by a random process. Apart from that, it matters whether a player has lied in the pre-play and whether she experienced her opponent's goodwill. Addressing the partner selection process, we find that contestant's voting decisions are based on objective criteria, i.e., their opponent's monetary contribution to the stake size, as well as subjective personal characteristics, i.e., the opponents' trustworthiness

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

Attraction and cooperative behavior

Being good-looking seems to generate substantial benefits in many social interactions, making the "beauty premium" a not to be underrated economic factor. This paper investigates how physical attractiveness enables people to generate these benefits in the case of cooperation, using field data from a modified one-shot prisoner's dilemma played in a high-stakes television game show. While attractive contestants are not more or less cooperative than less attractive ones, facial attractiveness produces more cooperative behavior by counterparts, but only in mixed-gender interactions. Effects of attractiveness are therefore not exclusively due to "beauty-is-good" stereotyping, but rather operate through a preference-based mechanism