Team reasoning - Experimental evidence on cooperation from centipede games

  • Previous laboratory studies on the centipede game have found that subjects exhibit surprisingly high levels of cooperation. Across disciplines, it has recently been highlighted that these high levels of cooperation might be explained by “team reasoning”, the willingness to think as a team rather than as an individual. We run an experiment with a standard centipede game as a baseline. In two treatments, we seek to induce team reasoning by making a joint goal salient. First, we implement a probabilistic variant of the centipede game that makes it easy to identify a joint goal. Second, we frame the game as a situation where a team of two soccer players attempts to score a goal. This frame increases the salience even more. Compared to the baseline, our treatments induce higher levels of cooperation. In a second experiment, we obtain similar evidence in a more natural environment–a beer garden during the 2014 FIFA Soccer World Cup. Our study contributes to understanding how a salient goal can support cooperation.

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Metadaten
Author:Johann Graf Lambsdorff, Marcus Giamattei, Katharina Werner, Manuel Schubert
URN:urn:nbn:de:bvb:739-opus4-5913
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0206666
ISSN:1932-6203
Parent Title (English):PloS ONE
Publisher:PLOS
Place of publication:San Francisco
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Year of Completion:2018
Date of Publication (online):2018/11/28
Date of first Publication:2018/11/28
Publishing Institution:Universität Passau
Release Date:2018/12/05
Tag:Altruistic behavior; Centipede game; Game theory; Games; Sports; Team reasoning
GND Keyword:Spieltheorie; Kooperatives Verhalten
Volume:13
Issue:11
Note:
Gefördert durch den Publikationsfonds der Universitätsbibliothek Passau
Institutes:Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 33 Wirtschaft / 330 Wirtschaft
open_access (DINI-Set):open_access
Licence (German):License LogoStandardbedingung laut Einverständniserklärung