Breakdown of Cooperation in Iterative Real-Time Trust Dilemmas

Abstract:     
We study a class of trust dilemmas with symmetric players that evolve in real-time. In these games, as long as all the n players continue to cooperate, the payoff function increases exponentially over time. Simultaneously, however, the temptation to defect also increases at the same rate. The first player to defect receives the present value of the payoff function whereas each of the other n-1 players only receives a fraction d of that player's payoff. We report the results of an iterated trust dilemma that varies the values of n and d in a between-subjects design. In all cases, trust-based cooperation breaks down in the population over iterations of the stage game with the rate of breakdown sharply increasing in n and slowly decreasing in d.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 20

Keywords: Centipede game, population dynamics, cooperation, trust dilemmas

JEL Classification: C72, C92, D81

Accepted Paper Series