Human players manage to extort more than the mutual cooperation payoff in repeated social dilemmas.

ABSTRACT: Social dilemmas are mixed-motive games. Although the players have a common interest in maintaining cooperation, each may try to obtain a larger payoff by cooperating less than the other. This phenomenon received increased attention after Press and Dyson discovered a class of strategies for the repeated prisoner's dilemma (extortionate strategies) that secure for themselves a payoff that is never smaller, but can be larger, than the opponent's payoff. We conducted an experiment to test whether humans adopt extortionate strategies when playing a social dilemma. Our results reveal that human subjects do try to extort a larger payoff from their opponents. However, they are only successful when extortionate strategies are part of a Nash equilibrium. In settings where extortionate strategies do

SUBMITTER: D'Arcangelo C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8377025 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature