Interactions across multiple games: cooperation, corruption, and organizational design

Abstract

Teamwork is vital in many settings, and it is socially beneficial for teams to cooperate in some situations (``good games'') and not in others (``bad games;'' e.g., those that allow for corruption). A team's cooperation in any given game depends on expectations of cooperation in future iterations of both good and bad games. We identify when sustaining cooperation on good games necessitates cooperation on bad games. We then characterize how a designer should optimally assign workers to teams and teams to tasks that involve varying arrival rates of good and bad games. Our results show how organizational design can be used to promote cooperation while minimizing corruption.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Different types of cooperation. In region 1, there is no cooperation. In region 2, there is total cooperation. In region 3, there is cooperation in the bad game only. In region 4, there is cooperation in the good game only.
• Figure 2: Optimal team structure candidates when bad games are necessary to sustain cooperation.
• Figure 3: Changing benefits from cooperation, $c_G$, and deviation temptations, $d_G$.

Theorems & Definitions (9)

• proof : Proof of Lemma \ref{['lem:equilibrium_characterization']}
• proof : Proof of Proposition \ref{['prop:optimal_reshuffling']}
• proof : Proof of Observation \ref{['obvs:full_specialization']}
• proof : Proof of Proposition \ref{['prop:task_assignment']}
• proof : Proof of Lemma \ref{['claim:pure']}
• proof : Proof of Proposition \ref{['prop:when']}
• proof : Proof of Lemma \ref{['lem:design_opt']}
• proof : Proof of Proposition \ref{['prop:main']}
• proof : Proof of Proposition \ref{['prop:main_g_unob']}