Abstract
We review two experiments in which the Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) team-game was compared with a single-group Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD). The first experiment (Bornstein & Ben-Yossef, 1994) compared the games when played once. We found that although the IPD and PD games are strategically equivalent, subjects were more likely to cooperate in the intergroup than in the single-group game. The second experiment (Bornstein, Winter, & Goren, in press) compared the IPD and PD games played repeatedly. We found again that subjects were initially more likely to cooperate in the IPD game than in the PD game. However, cooperation rates decreased as the game progressed and, as a result, the differences between the two games disappeared. This pattern suggests that subjects learn the structure of the game and adapt their behavior accordingly. Computer simulations based on the learning model of Roth & Erev (1995) support this interpretation.
We would like to thank the Israeli Academy of Science for supporting this research.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin — Heidelberg
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Bornstein, G., Winter, E., Goren, H. (1997). Cooperation in Intergroup and Single-Group Prisoner’s Dilemma Games. In: Albers, W., Güth, W., Hammerstein, P., Moldovanu, B., van Damme, E. (eds) Understanding Strategic Interaction. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60495-9_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60495-9_32
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