Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/279284 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 10534
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
Social interactions predominantly take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature explains cooperation in indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma as predominantly driven by self-interested strategic considerations. This paper provides a causal test of the importance of social preferences for cooperation, varying the composition of interactions to be either homogeneous or heterogeneous in terms of these preferences. Through a series of pre-registered experiments (N = 1,074), we show that groups of prosocial individuals achieve substantially higher levels of cooperation. The cooperation gap between prosocial and selfish groups persists even when the shadow of the future is increased to make cooperation attractive for the selfish and when common knowledge about group composition is removed.
Subjects: 
cooperation
indefinitely repeated games
prisoner's dilemma
social preferences
experiment
JEL: 
C73
C91
C92
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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