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Game Experiments on Cooperation Through Reward and Punishment

  • Thematic Issue Article: Strategic Interaction
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Abstract

Game experiments designed to test the effectiveness of reward and/or punishment incentives in promoting cooperative behavior among their participants are quite common. Results from two such recent experiments conducted in Beijing, based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) game and Public Goods Game respectively, are summarized here. The unexpected empirical outcomes for the repeated PD game, that cooperation actually decreased when the participants had the option of using a costly punishment strategy and that participants who used costly punishment in some round of the repeated game often did so in the first round, are discussed in terms of differences in attitudes toward reputation in Chinese culture compared to other locations (mostly in Western society) where similar experiments have been conducted. The second experiment models an institution providing incentives to increase contribution levels (i.e., cooperation) to the public good. The results show that combined institutional reward and punishment is the most effective means to increase cooperation, followed by a scheme using only punishment. It is shown how these empirical results are related to the theoretical predictions that assume players play rationally by optimizing their personal payoff given their opponents’ actions in these multi-player games.

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Notes

  1. In PGG, Cooperate corresponds to contributing the entire endowment and Defect to contributing nothing.

  2. From this perspective, option A (i.e., Cooperate) could be called costly reward instead since the player pays a cost c for the other player to receive the benefit b.

  3. In our T1, there is in fact a highly significant decrease in average payoff compared with C1 (Wu et al. 2009).

  4. The two-player games of the “Costly Punishment and the PD Game” section with payoff matrices (1) and (2) are also symmetric but have only finitely many pure strategies (two and three respectively).

  5. In our second experiment (Wu et al. 2012), there are actually three protocols, one of which (Const) takes A fixed. The two other are Up (Down) where A increases (decreases) with higher group contributions.

  6. In particular, this could be the same person.

  7. See Wu et al. (2012) for the detailed experimental design. For instance, the participants were not told that there were exactly 50 rounds.

  8. Expected relative payoff is the difference between his expected payoff given his current contribution and given that he changes his contribution to the average of the other group members.

  9. Anti-social punishment refers to peers punishing high contributors (e.g., Cooperators) as opposed to pro-social punishment mentioned in the “Costly Punishment and the PD Game” section where peers punish Defectors. The levels of anti-social punishment in PGG with peer incentives are culturally dependent, although they appear to be about the same in China as in Western society (Herrmann et al. 2008). The first round pre-emptive punishment reported in Wu et al. (2009) for the PD game with costly punishment is neither anti- nor pro-social in the strict sense, although it is heursitically closer to the former.

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Acknowledgments

Support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and from National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31270439) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Ross Cressman

  2. Key Lab of Animal Ecology and Conservational Biology, Centre for Computational and Evolutionary Biology, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jia-Jia Wu, Cong Li & Yi Tao

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  1. Ross Cressman
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  2. Jia-Jia Wu
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  3. Cong Li
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  4. Yi Tao
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Correspondence to Ross Cressman.

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Cressman, R., Wu, JJ., Li, C. et al. Game Experiments on Cooperation Through Reward and Punishment. Biol Theory 8, 158–166 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-013-0106-2

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