Inspired by the epistemic game theory framework, I elicit subjects’ preferences over outcomes, beliefs about strategies, and beliefs about beliefs in a variety of simple games. I find that the prisoners’ dilemma and the traditional centipede game are both Bayesian games, with many non-selfish types. Many players choose strategies that are clearly inconsistent with their elicited beliefs and pre...

Resource-based theory implicitly assumes that property rights to resources are secure. Extant property rights theory enables us to relax this assumption to take into account processes where there are struggles in establishing property rights that enhance the realized economic value of resources. A case study of oil field unitization (where a single firm is designated as unit operator to develop...

We propose a simple mechanism that sustains full cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of self-interested agents. Players sequentially decide whether to contribute to a public good. They do not know their position in the sequence, but observe the actions of some predecessors. Position uncertainty provides an incentive to contribute in order to induce potential successors...

There has been an accumulation of research on voluntarily repeated prisoners’ dilemma with no information flow. This paper provides a unified comparison of various systems to enforce cooperation, as the matching probability changes. In many cases, the loss of payoff by not being able to adjust actions until the next period turned out to be greater than the loss of payoff by not being able to ad...

The ability to accurately assess others’ intents, beliefs, and emotions – called Theory of Mind (ToM) – is conjectured to be important for social cooperation. We study the role of ToM ability in fostering cooperation in the simultaneous and sequential prisoners dilemma (PD) games. Our norm-based model predicts that high ToM ability individuals will believe in more cooperation and cooperate at h...

We introduce and apply a new learning mechanism, episodic learning. This learning paradigm is shown to be tightly linked to a natural form of reinforcement learning. Surprisingly, though the defect action in the ‘Prisoners’ Dilemma’ setting is a dominant strategy (and the only evolutionary stable strategy), when using episodic learning partial cooperation is obtained, which is stable against in...

In this work we plan to expand upon recent studies that have investigated the coevolution of network structure and strategy choice in prisoners' dilemma games played repeatedly on a network. This literature finds that assortative link formation is an important support for the evolution of cooperative behavior, and that the stability of cooperative equilibria depends on the time scale on which t...

We model strategies of experimental subjects playing indefinitely repeated games as finite state machines. In order to do likelihood-based inference on machines using data from experiments, we add a stochastic element to the machines. As in most machine models for repeated game strategies, state transitions are deterministic. Actions, however, are random and their distribution is state dependen...

Fairness is a strong concern as shown by dictator and ultimatum experiments. Efficiency, measured by the sum of individual payoffs, is a potentially competing concern in games such as the prisoners’ dilemma. In our experiment participants can increase efficiency by gift giving. In the one-sided treatment this is only possible for one of the two partners. The two-sided treatment allows for mutua...

We report constructing quantum games directly from a system of Bell’s inequalities using Arthur Fine’s analysis published in early 1980s. This analysis showed that such a system of inequalities forms a set of both necessary and sufficient conditions required to find a joint distribution function compatible with a given set of joint probabilities, in terms of which the system of Bell’s inequalit...