COOPERATION WITHOUT REPUTATION - EXPERIMENTAL-EVIDENCE FROM PRISONERS-DILEMMA GAMES

This paper investigates cooperative play in prisoner's dilemma games b y designing an experiment to evaluate the ability of two leading theor ies of observed cooperation: reputation building and altruism. We anal yze both one-shot and finitely repeated games to gauge the importance of these theories. We conclude that neither altruism nor reputation bu ilding alone can explain our observations. The reputation model is inc onsistent with play in both one shots and finitely repeated games whil e the model with altruism is unable to explain observed play in the fi nitely repeated games. (C) 1995 Academic Press,Inc.