Institutional Preferences in the Laboratory

TL;DR

The paper investigates how groups can steer cooperative outcomes by endogenizing the environment through choosing among toy institutions that vary in stability, efficiency, and fairness. It conducts online, asynchronous experiments where participants repeatedly engage with paired games, then select preferred institutions and continue playing, enabling analysis of both within-game cooperation and between-game preferences. Results show a strong, consistent preference for efficiency, with notable interaction effects: efficiency can dominate even when it yields lower cooperation, and the path by which features are introduced affects whether stable, fair, or efficient institutions emerge. These findings imply that individual preferences can drive cultural evolution of institutions but do not guarantee cooperative norms, highlighting the need for design mechanisms that prevent path dependence and promote robust, group-beneficial outcomes in dynamic social systems.

Abstract

Getting a group to adopt cooperative norms is an enduring challenge. But in real-world settings, individuals don't just passively accept static environments, they act both within and upon the social systems that structure their interactions. Should we expect the dynamism of player-driven changes to the "rules of the game" to hinder cooperation -- because of the substantial added complexity -- or help it, as prosocial agents tweak their environment toward non-zero-sum games? We introduce a laboratory setting to test whether groups can guide themselves to cooperative outcomes by manipulating the environmental parameters that shape their emergent cooperation process. We test for cooperation in a set of economic games that impose different social dilemmas. These games vary independently in the institutional features of stability, efficiency, and fairness. By offering agency over behavior along with second-order agency over the rules of the game, we understand emergent cooperation in naturalistic settings in which the rules of the game are themselves dynamic and subject to choice. The literature on transfer learning in games suggests that interactions between features are important and might aid or hinder the transfer of cooperative learning to new settings.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Game Design
• Figure 2: Game procedure
• Figure 3: Comparing between-game preference and within-game cooperation
• Figure 4: Between Game Comparison between First and Second Layer
• Figure 5: Between Game Comparison between Second and Third Layer