Role of Social Preferences in Cooperative Behavior

• Applicant: Peter Katuscak, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Economic Theory
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491485777

The proposed project uses experimental methods to investigate the link between willingness of humans to cooperate in one-shot social dilemma situations and their social preferences. There could be many types of social preferences that can explain cooperation: altruism, social welfare maximization, reciprocity, conformity or aversion to material payoff inequality. Understanding which of these drivers are more prominent than the others is important for building institutions that foster cooperation. For example, reciprocity suggests stressing how kind others' cooperative actions are to oneself. Conformity suggests underlining cooperativeness of a majority of people in the reference group as a guide to individual behavior. Inequality aversion suggests appealing to fairness concerns. Disentangling the impact of these drivers requires knowledge regarding what people believe about cooperativeness of other people, though. Accurately measuring such beliefs is typically challenging. To circumvent the issue, we concentrate on conditional cooperation (CC), i.e., how one's cooperativeness responds to known cooperativeness of others. We use a linear public good game and we build on the work of Fischbacher, Fehr and Gächter (2001). In Study 1, we propose a method to distinguish between reciprocity, conformity, inequality aversion and residual factors as the four drivers of CC. The study is based on different treatments that vary what exactly subjects know about cooperativeness of others. We progressively reduce the informational content of this variable to gradually exclude more and more potential drivers of the conditional response. Treatment differences then identify the contribution of each factor. In Study 2, we propose a modification of the method used in Study 1 that is, in some aspects, further away from the existing literature, but has a potential to provide a better identification strategy. This method aims to reduce potential experimenter demand effects that might affect subject behavior and hence interpretation of the results. In Study 3, we use a different method in order to estimate the extent to which CC is driven by social preferences. This method compares cooperative behavior when playing with humans as opposed to playing with computerized players. Overall, the project aims to work toward developing a reliable empirical methodology for relating CC to social preferencess. Its output should inform future research on the topic. We aim to publish output of the project in leading field journals in Experimental Economics or Game Theory.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Czech Republic
• Cooperation Partner: Tomas Miklanek