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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.
Climate change is leading to an increased scarcity of resources such as freshwater, energy, arable land and wildlife. This is perceived as a major security threat. However, the literature remains unclear on whether scarcity mitigates or exacerbates conflict. We design a novel laboratory experiment to investigate hostile behavior under scarcity. Participants interact repeatedly in a dynamic common-pool resource (CPR) and a joy-of-destruction game. The experiment distinguishes between two types of scarcity: Endogenous scarcity in the form of a deliberate human choice to overexploit resources and exogenous scarcity in the form of adverse environmental conditions. Our results show that endogenous scarcity exacerbates hostility. We trace this to participants being guided by negative reciprocity while finding no support for inequality aversion. The results indicate that to avoid hostility, policy makers will have to reduce human-induced scarcity. However, our results also show that exogenous scarcity mitigates hostility. This is in line with a vast body of literature from psychology, anthropology and biology finding increased levels of cooperation for all forms of life under environmental distress. It suggests that managing perceptions around increasing scarcities could be a second potential avenue for policy action.