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Participants’ reaction to if their contribution was less / more than the group average in the previous round
Source publication
In this paper we show experimentally that conditional cooperation, a phenomenon described in the private provision of public goods, is also present in group contests, where participants’ contributions to their group performance partially determines if they overcome a rival group. This environment allows us to identify new determinants of conditiona...
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Citations
... Then, winning (losing) the contest increase (decrease) social status and the utility derived from cooperation. Two previous studies found that, in a repeated public good game with strategic incentives to win, deserved losers tended to increase their donations regardless of the previous individual contribution (Tan and Bolle, 2007;Kiss et al., 2020). This increment in cooperation is somehow contrary to the expectations from the biosocial model of status that postulates that losers should decrease their predisposition to compete again (Mazur and Booth, 1998), and then, to reduce cooperation in the next round, but instead, the increment of cooperation might represent an opportunity for losers to regain status (Daly and Wilson, 1988;Mehta and Josephs, 2006). ...
... This increment in cooperation is somehow contrary to the expectations from the biosocial model of status that postulates that losers should decrease their predisposition to compete again (Mazur and Booth, 1998), and then, to reduce cooperation in the next round, but instead, the increment of cooperation might represent an opportunity for losers to regain status (Daly and Wilson, 1988;Mehta and Josephs, 2006). Results regarding the victory condition were ambiguous: while in one study winners decreased donations (Tan and Bolle, 2007), in the other acted as conditional cooperators (Kiss et al., 2020), which are not expected responses in conventional approaches in which winners increase their competitive motivations (Mazur, 1985;Geniole et al., 2017). Consequently, due to the lack of consistency between empirical data and within theoretical predictions, our goal is to contribute to clarify the effect of competition outcome on male ingroup cooperation under intergroup conflicts. ...
... On the one hand, these results are partially in accordance with studies under similar methodological conditions, that is, using the threshold public good game under an intergroup contest. These studies found that losers increased contributions when their group contributed less than the rival group (deserving losers) (Tan and Bolle, 2007;Kiss et al., 2020). On the other hand, for the victory condition, results differ between studies: while in one study winners acted as conditional cooperators (Kiss et al., 2020) in the other winners decreased contributions with and without monetary incentives (Tan and Bolle, 2007). ...
Introduction
The Male Warrior Hypothesis (MWH) proposes that sex-specific selective pressures have promoted male cooperation with the ingroup members to outcompete rival groups. However, intergroup conflicts do not occur in isolation and the outcomes of previous competitions may influence group cooperativeness. Since this phenomenon is not well understood, we aimed to shed light on the effect of previous competition outcome on later cooperative behavior under intergroup conflicts. Based on the MWH, we hypothesized that repeated contests between groups could enhance ingroup cooperation, regardless of the outcome of the previous contest because status is at risk, but when competition is not present, participants would move to the symmetric equilibria.
Methods
To test this hypothesis, we recruited 246 individuals organized in groups of 6 and measured cooperation using a threshold public good game over two rounds, manipulating the outcome in the first round to create groups of winners and losers.
Results
Our results show that intergroup conflict scenarios promoted cooperation in both victory and defeat conditions, whereas, in the control scenario only losers increased their cooperation.
Discussion
We argue that winners under the presence of an external threat may enhance in-group cooperation in order to assure their status; whereas, losers may be attempting to regain it.
... 11 There is also evidence that different individuals have different tendencies to cooperate, some individuals acting as conditional cooperators, and others as free-riders. Conditional cooperation has been found to be a key factor in sustaining high contributions in public good games (Ostrom 2000;Keser and Van Winden 2000;Thöni and Volk 2018), and there is evidence that it plays also a role in group contests (Kiss et al. 2020). Relatedly, social identity the-10 Sheremeta (2013) reports based on 30 studies that the median over-expenditure is 72%. ...
We study experimentally cooperation in group contests under a new sharing rule that captures elements of coopetitive setups that are often characterized by the tension between cooperation and competition. It introduces an allocation of the obtained prize which is inversely proportional to individual efforts. We use it to study if the pervasive over-expenditure observed in group contests remains even when individual effort is extremely disincentivized and compare its effects with the egalitarian sharing rule. Participants in our experiment make more effort with the egalitarian than with the inverse proportional rule, but we document a sizeable over-expenditure even with the inverse proportional rule. We find that contribution in a public goods game is positively associated with effort in the group contest. Social value orientation, risk attitudes, competitiveness, or other personality traits do not predict behavior consistently.
... However, many societal concerns require cooperation and decisions of not just two individuals 5 . Multipleplayer (or n-player) games have been studied extensively by researchers in various fields 12,26,[36][37][38][39][40] , especially in behavioural science 41,42 and other application areas 2,12,23,28,29,44,45 . The most studied n-player cooperative game is the public goods game (PGG) 32,41 , which is the n-player PD 32,33 . ...
The study of cooperation has been extensively studied in game theory. Especially, two-player two-strategy games have been categorized according to their equilibrium strategies and fully analysed. Recently, a grand unified game covering all types of two-player two-strategy games, i.e., the weightlifting game, was proposed. In the present study, we extend this two-player weightlifting game into an nn-player game. We investigate the conditions for pure strategy Nash equilibria and for Pareto optimal strategies, expressed in terms of the success probability and benefit-to-cost ratio of the weightlifting game. We also present a general characterization of nn-player games in terms of the proposed game. In terms of a concrete example, we present diagrams showing how the game category varies depending on the benefit-to-cost ratio. As a general rule, cooperation becomes difficult to achieve as group size increases because the success probability of weightlifting saturates towards unity. The present study provides insights into achieving behavioural cooperation in a large group by means of a cost–benefit analysis.
