Best, James

In this paper, I look at the interaction between social learning and cooperativebehavior. I model this using a social dilemma game with publicly observedsequential actions and asymmetric information about payoffs. I find that someinformed agents in this model act, individually and without collusion, to concealthe privately optimal action. Because the privately optimal action is sociallycostly the behavior of informed agents can lead to a Pareto improvement in a social dilemma. In my model I show that it is possible to get cooperative behaviorif information is restricted to a small but non-zero proportion of the population.Moreover, such cooperative behavior occurs in a finite setting where it is publicknowledge which agent will act last. The proportion of cooperative agents withinthe population can be made arbitrarily close to 1 by increasing the finite numberof agents playing the game. Finally, I show that under a broad set of conditionsthat it is a Pareto improvement on a corner value, in the ex-ante welfare sense,for an interior proportion of the population to be informed

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When Do We Learn to Cooperate? The Role of Social Learning in Social Dilemmas

https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/files/20029237/best_2011_social_learning_social_dilemma.pdf

When Do We Learn to Cooperate? The Role of Social Learning in Social Dilemmas

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