Coordination and Cooperation
An extensive experimental literature has documented miscoordination in establishing cooperative relationships when they can be supported in indefinitely repeated games: some people systematically try to cooperate, while others do not. The literature has had little success in finding personal characteristics that correlate systematically with these behaviors. We show that subjects who play the risky but efficient action in a simple coordination game (i.e., play stag in a stag hunt game) are significantly more likely to cooperate in indefinitely repeated games. This suggests that subjects who are less susceptible to strategic uncertainty are more likely to attempt to establish cooperative relationships.
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