Theory and Experimental Evidence of Cooperation and Coordination

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Cooperation and coordination for successful collective action has drawn much attention in the formal and experimental literature for decades. Where the mechanism behind successful collective action is not well understood yet, however, is when cooperation and coordination takes place in a complex decision-making context. Such complex contexts arise, for example, because of heterogeneity of agents, high uncertainty, or when consequential political decisions are taken by algorithm. Empirical examples of complex context emerge in diverse societies, decisions taken after or within rounds of multi-player bargaining, coordination problems where beliefs about the coordination target do not form easily around focal points, or with the increasing use of computers in making bureaucratic decisions and regulating social life. The panel brings together theoretical and empirical work evaluating the causes of successful collective action. The submitted papers investigate whether cross-cultural variation in anti-social punishment is indeed the source of variation in cooperation in public goods games and how deliberation affects information aggregation and coordination in voting games. They identify team reasoning experimentally and assess how it shapes behavior in coordination games as well as ask whether interacting with artificial decision-makers facilitates or hampers cooperation and pro-social behavior. The panel is unified in its use of behavioral games as core of the experimental evidence the manuscripts present as well as by formalizing clear behavioral expectations. The papers complete each other by speaking to different factors determining whether collective action is successful. The panel also brings authors together with different backgrounds - formal theory, behavioral political economy, political psychology, experimental methods - and a focus on different empirical cases as well as junior and senior colleagues.

Sub Unit

• Division 4: Formal Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Who Punishes? Cooperation and Defection across Cultures - Talbot M Andrews, Cornell University

• How Collective Deliberation Affects Democratic Outcomes: Theory and Experiment - Kai Ou, Florida State University

• Identifying Team Reasoning - Dominik Duell, University of Innsbruck; Catherine Hafer, New York University; Dimitri Landa, NYU

• How Does Interaction with Artificial Agents Affect Prosociality among Humans? - Reuben Kline, SUNY, Stony Brook University

Chair

• Dominik Duell University of Innsbruck

Discussants

• Abraham Samuel Aldama Navarrete Vote Rev

• Gento Kato Nazarbayev University