Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/102624 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2013-8
Publisher: 
Brown University, Department of Economics, Providence, RI
Abstract: 
Previous research has shown that opportunities for two-sided partner choice in finitely repeated social dilemma games can promote cooperation through a combination of sorting and opportunistic signaling, with late period defections by selfish players causing an end-game decline. How such experience would affect play of subsequent finitely-repeated games remains unclear. In each of six treatments that vary the cooperation premium and the informational basis for reputation formation, we let sets of subjects play sequences of finitely-repeated voluntary contribution games to study the competing forces of (a) learning about the benefits of reputation, and (b) learning about backward unraveling. We find, inter alia, that with a high cooperation premium and good information, investment in reputation grows across sets of finitely-repeated games.
Subjects: 
cooperation
reputation
voluntary contribution
public goods
sorting
endogenous grouping
group formation
experiment
JEL: 
C92
D74
D83
H41
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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