Conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion

Cubitt, Robin; Gaechter, Simon; Quercia, Simone

Abstract

We investigate whether there is an association between conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion, two phenomena that we conjecture share common psychological characteristics despite having been studied largely separately in the previous literature. We use a public goods game to categorize subjects by type of contribution preference and we measure betrayal aversion for different categories of subject. We report three studies, using two different methods to measure betrayal aversion: a standard elicitation with monetary incentives and a novel scenario-based measure that we argue addresses concerns about the standard measure. We find strong and robust evidence of an association between conditional cooperation and betrayal aversion in the scenario-based measures but not in the standard measure.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 24, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Jul 1, 2017
• Publication Date: Sep 30, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jul 12, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 12, 2017
• Journal: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
• Electronic ISSN: 0167-2681
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 141
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.06.013
• Keywords: Public goods game; Conditional cooperation; Trust; Betrayal aversion; Exploitation aversion; Free riding; Experiments
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/885550
• Publisher URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268117301713