On May 24th Ozan Aksoy of the University College London, UK gave a talk at the ISTC-CNR entitled “Partner Selection and Cooperation in the Lab”.

Date: 24 May 2017
Time: 14:30 – 16:00
Location: Aula Piaget, ISTC-CNR

Partner Selection and Cooperation in the Lab

Abstract:

Theoretical and empirical work on social dilemmas has yielded important insights into why people cooperate, despite the temptation to free ride on contributions from their interaction partners. But this work largely ignores processes that bring interaction partners together in a social dilemma situation in the first place. Drawing upon the results of two studies, we demonstrate the importance of studying partner selection dynamics in understanding social dilemma behaviour. The first study shows game-theoretically and experimentally that partner selection mitigates the negative effects of actors’ heterogeneity in social identity on actors’ likelihood of cooperation. The second study tackles the puzzle of how certain groups (e.g. mega-churches or social movements) continue attracting new members at an increasing rate despite the risk of being invaded by free-riders. In four laboratory experiments conducted in the US and UK the second study shows that endogenous group formation processes can mitigate the free-rider problem in dynamic groups.