Journal
ROYAL SOCIETY OPEN SCIENCE
Volume 6, Issue 7, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsos.182142
Keywords
cooperation; experiment; human behaviour; Prisoner's Dilemma
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Funding
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation)
- Open Access Publication Fund of University of Potsdam
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Cooperation is-despite not being predicted by game theory-a widely documented aspect of human behaviour in Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) situations. This article presents a comparison between subjects restricted to playing pure strategies and subjects allowed to play mixed strategies in a one-shot symmetric PD laboratory experiment. Subjects interact with 10 other subjects and take their decisions all at once. Because subjects in the mixed-strategy treatment group are allowed to condition their level of cooperation more precisely on their beliefs about their counterparts' level of cooperation, we predicted the cooperation rate in the mixed-strategy treatment group to be higher than in the pure-strategy control group. The results of our experiment reject our prediction: even after controlling for beliefs about the other subjects' level of cooperation, we find that cooperation in the mixed-strategy group is lower than in the pure-strategy group. We also find, however, that subjects in the mixed-strategy group condition their cooperative behaviour more closely on their beliefs than in the pure-strategy group. In the mixed-strategy group, most subjects choose intermediate levels of cooperation.
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