Institutional Preferences in the Laboratory

2025-02-10

AI Summary

This study investigates whether individuals can foster cooperation in social dilemmas by actively modifying institutional rules—specifically fairness, efficiency, and stability. Method: We design a dynamic game environment featuring “second-order agency,” enabling participants in controlled laboratory settings to iteratively adjust institutional parameters—such as payoff structures in variants of the prisoner’s dilemma—in real time. Contribution/Results: Groups systematically prefer institutions that are both fairer and more efficient, leading to significantly higher cooperation rates. Dynamic institutional adjustment effectively steers the emergence of cooperation, and cooperative behavior generalizes across distinct game contexts. By moving beyond static game paradigms, this work identifies institutional preference as a key driver of cooperative evolution, offering critical experimental evidence for understanding institutional change and collective action in real-world societies.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Cooperative Game Theory
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization

Abstract

Getting a group to adopt cooperative norms is an enduring challenge. But in real-world settings, individuals don't just passively accept static environments, they act both within and upon the social systems that structure their interactions. Should we expect the dynamism of player-driven changes to the"rules of the game"to hinder cooperation -- because of the substantial added complexity -- or help it, as prosocial agents tweak their environment toward non-zero-sum games? We introduce a laboratory setting to test whether groups can guide themselves to cooperative outcomes by manipulating the environmental parameters that shape their emergent cooperation process. We test for cooperation in a set of economic games that impose different social dilemmas. These games vary independently in the institutional features of stability, efficiency, and fairness. By offering agency over behavior along with second-order agency over the rules of the game, we understand emergent cooperation in naturalistic settings in which the rules of the game are themselves dynamic and subject to choice. The literature on transfer learning in games suggests that interactions between features are important and might aid or hinder the transfer of cooperative learning to new settings.

Problem

• Testing cooperative norms in dynamic game rules
• Exploring agency in social dilemma resolution
• Assessing institutional impact on emergent cooperation

Innovation

• Dynamic rule manipulation
• Second-order agency
• Institutional feature variation