Experimental Implications of Theoretic Models: Workshop

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

The researchers are holding a workshop as part of the Political Science Program's Experimental Implications of Theoretic Models activity. They are focusing on the linkage between formal and empirical analyses of repeated social dilemma games. Understanding cooperation in the context of social dilemma games is fundamental to understanding how alternative institutional arrangements may foster collective action in a wide diversity of political settings. An abundance of experimental evidence is inconsistent with predictions from existing non-cooperative game-theoretic models based strictly on self-regarding preferences. In recent years, scholars have turned to alternative representations of utility in an attempt to capture motivational heterogeneity across individuals. While multiple models have been posited, no one model yet appears to explain the rich data that has been obtained by multiple experimental researchers who have conducted a very large number o repeated social dilemma experiments using various specifications of many variables including: The size of the collective benefit obtained if all participants cooperated; The level of knowledge that individuals have about each other's identity; The number of participants involved; The nature of communication among subjects; and, The possibility of sanctioning one another. While many theoretical possibilities have been generated, no one has been able to test his or her ideas against an aggregated data set covering all of these conditions precisely, because such a data set has not yet been put together and made publicly available. Given the diversity of formal models and large number of experiments that have already been conducted, the time is ripe to create a multicampus, multidisciplinary Research Work Team to: plan the construction of an easy-to-use consistent database containing many data sets contributed by experimental researchers; review recent formal models explaining levels of cooperation in repeated social dilemmas in order to examine similarities and differences in theoretical structure as well as in predictions derived from alternative models; plan further analyses of these data in order to test the models comprehensively; refine better theoretical models to explain cooperation in repeated social dilemmas; provide a general scientific plan for developing further theoretical and empirical research in light of the results of the above steps. The researchers are holding the first meeting of the Research Work Team in January, 2003, and this project focuses primarily on the plans for this meeting.