Is a PD game still a dilemma for Japanese rural villagers? A field and laboratory comparison of the impact of social group membership on cooperation
The Japanese Economic Review(2021)
Abstract
Local norms and shared beliefs in cohesive social groups regulate individual behavior in everyday economic life. I use a door-to-door field experiment where a hundred and twenty villagers recruited from twenty-three communities in a Japanese rural mountainous village play a simultaneous prisoner’s dilemma game. To examine whether a set of experiences shared through interactions among community members affect experimental behavior, I compare villagers’ behavior under in-community and out-community random matching protocols. I also report a counterpart laboratory experiment with seventy-two university student subjects to address the external validity of laboratory experiments. The findings are three-fold. First, almost full cooperation is achieved when villagers play a prisoner’s dilemma game with their anonymous community members. Second, cooperation is significantly higher within the in-group compared to the out-group treatment in both the laboratory and field experiments. Third, although a significant treatment effect of social group membership is preserved, a big difference in the average cooperation rates is observed between the laboratory and field.
MoreTranslated text
Key words
Lab-in-the-field experiment,Cooperation,Group identity,External validity,Local norms,Prisoner’s dilemma
AI Read Science
Must-Reading Tree
Example
Generate MRT to find the research sequence of this paper
Chat Paper
Summary is being generated by the instructions you defined