Pledges of Commitment and Cooperation in Partnerships

We use experimental methods to investigate whether pledges of commitment can improve cooperation in endogenously-formed partnerships facing a social dilemma. Treatments vary in terms of the individual’s: (1) opportunity to commit to their partner; (2) the cost of dissolving committed partnerships; and (3) the distribution of these dissolution costs between partners. Our findings show that pledges of commitment alone can increase cooperation and welfare in committed partnerships. The introduction of relatively large and equally split costs yields similar gains. In contrast, when costs to dissolve committed partnerships fall solely on the individual choosing to break up, pledges of commitment fail to improve cooperation and welfare. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/g7010004 Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-121132 Veröffentlichte Version Originally published at: Deer, Lachlan; Bayer, Ralph-C (2016). Pledges of commitment and cooperation in partnerships. Games, 7(1):Article 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/g7010004 Article Pledges of Commitment and Cooperation in Partnerships Lachlan Deer 1,* and Ralph-C. Bayer 2 Received: 26 October 2015 ; Accepted: 5 January 2016 ; Published: 20 January 2016 Academic Editor: Ananish Chaudhuri 1 Department of Economics, University of Zurich, Schönberggasse 1, Zurich CH 8001, Switzerland 2 School of Economics, University of Adelaide, Adelaide SA 5005, Australia; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +41-78-634-3588 Abstract: We use experimental methods to investigate whether pledges of commitment can improve cooperation in endogenously-formed partnerships facing a social dilemma. Treatments vary in terms of the individual’s: (1) opportunity to commit to their partner; (2) the cost of dissolving committed partnerships; and (3) the distribution of these dissolution costs between partners. Our findings show that pledges of commitment alone can increase cooperation and welfare in committed partnerships. The introduction of relatively large and equally split costs yields similar gains. In contrast, when costs to dissolve committed partnerships fall solely on the individual choosing to break up, pledges of commitment fail to improve cooperation and welfare. We use experimental methods to investigate whether pledges of commitment can improve cooperation in endogenously-formed partnerships facing a social dilemma. Treatments vary in terms of the individual’s: (1) opportunity to commit to their partner; (2) the cost of dissolving committed partnerships; and (3) the distribution of these dissolution costs between partners. Our findings show that pledges of commitment alone can increase cooperation and welfare in committed partnerships. The introduction of relatively large and equally split costs yields similar gains. In contrast, when costs to dissolve committed partnerships fall solely on the individual choosing to break up, pledges of commitment fail to improve cooperation and welfare.