Computer Mediated Communication and the Emergence of "Electronic Opportunism"

An experiment on how communication affects cooperation in a social dilemma shows that computer mediated communication (CMC) and face to face communication have markedly different effects on patterns of collective behavior. While face to face communication sustains stable cooperation, CMC makes cooperative agreements in groups extremely fragile, giving rise to waves of opportunistic behavior. Further analysis of communication protocols highlights that the breakdown of ordinary communication rules plays an important role in explaining the fragility of cooperation in electronic contexts.1 1 We thank Lin Ostrom and James Walker for providing us information about their original experiments. Claudia Keser, Marino Pavanati, Alessandro Tonchia and Enrico Zaninotto helped us in different phases of our work. The research was supported by a grant of the Fondazione Rosselli, Italy.