Conditional Cooperation: Disentangling Strategic from Non-Strategic Motivations

Revisiting strategic versus non-strategic cooperation

We propose a novel experimental method that disentangles strategicallyand non-strategicallymotivated behavior. We apply it to an indefinitely-repeated prisoner’s dilemma game to observe simultaneously how the same individual behaves in situations with future interaction and in situations with no future interaction, while controlling for expectations. This method allows us to determine the exten...

Cooperation in Strategic Games Revisited∗

For two-person complete-information strategic games with transferable utility, all major variable-threat bargaining and arbitration solutions coincide. This confluence of solutions by luminaries such as Nash, Harsanyi, Raiffa, and Selten, is more than mere coincidence. Staying in the class of two-person games with transferable unility, the present paper presents a more complete theory that expa...

Conditional Obligations in Strategic Situations

We investigate Horty’s action constants and their functioning in action obligations of the form “In the interest of group F of agents, group G of agents ought to perform action K” and in conditional action obligations of the form “If group H of agents performs action L, then in the interest of group F of agents, group G of agents ought to perform action K”. We show that a straightforward Horty-...

Reasoning in Strategic and Non-Strategic Interactions

Bargaining and Cooperation in Strategic Form Games

In this paper we view bargaining and cooperation as an interaction superimposed on a game in strategic form. A multistage bargaining procedure for N players, the “proposer commitment” procedure, is presented. It is inspired by Nash’s two-player variable-threat model; a key feature is the commitment to “threats.” We establish links to classical cooperative game theory solutions, such as the Shap...