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Cooperation in stochastic games: a prisoner’s dilemma experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Andrew Kloosterman Open the ORCID record for Andrew Kloosterman [Opens in a new window]
Andrew Kloosterman*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, PO Box 400182, 22901 Charlottesville, VA, USA
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This experiment investigates a stochastic version of the infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma. The stochastic element introduces the importance of beliefs about the future for supporting cooperation as well as cooperation and defection on the equilibrium path. There is more cooperation in treatments where beliefs predict cooperation after subjects gain sufficient experience. There is some evidence for cooperation and defection as predicted by equilibrium, but there is stronger evidence for behavior conditioning on past actions that is not consistent with equilibrium play. In particular, subjects continue cooperating even when it is no longer possible in equilibrium for the realized game.

Keywords

Stochastic gamesExperimental economicsPrisoner’s dilemmaCooperation

JEL classification

C92: Laboratory, Group Behavior C73: Stochastic and Dynamic Games • Evolutionary Games • Repeated Games
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 447 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-019-09619-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A. Kloosterman: I wish to thank Andrew Schotter, Guillaume Fréchette, Emmanuel Vespa, and Jack Fanning for their help on this project, as well as participants at the North American ESA Conference 2012, CESS-Amsterdam Graduate Student Conference 2014, the SEA Conference 2015, and the UVA Experimental Social Science Conference 2016 and two anonymous referees for insightful comments. Also, thanks to NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research grant SES-1260840 and UVA for financial support.

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