Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma: an experimental comparison between pure and mixed strategies.

ABSTRACT: 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

SUBMITTER: Heuer L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6689633 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature