Agenda

Ludovica Spinola - Spillover effects over more or less competitive Prisoner’s Dilemmas: the role of gender - PhD Predefense

Abstract: 

"A worker within a firm, or a researcher within the academia, is required to both cooperate with colleagues in team-projects and to compete with them for career progressions. Hence, within the workplaces, individuals need to adapt when moving from more competitive to more cooperative tasks, and vice-versa. We experimentally test whether there are spill-over effects, and whether women and men behave differently when moving from a more competitive (cooperative) Prisoner’s Dilemma to a more cooperative (competitive) one. As a measure of the competitiveness and cooperativeness of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, we consider two different level of the competitiveness-cooperativeness index (CCI) (Demuynck et al., 2022). Following Duffy and Fehr (2018), in our Baseline treatment we consider three stages of an indefinitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game in which we manipulate the order according to which the high CCI and low CCI Prisoner’s Dilemmas are played. In our Decomposed treatment, we only vary whether the Prisoner’s Dilemma is presented in normal-form or decomposed into a zero-sum component and a common interest component.

Our results, besides supporting the efficacy of the CCI index in measuring the competitiveness and cooperativeness of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, show that, when moving from a more cooperative Prisoner’s Dilemma (CCI low) to a more competitive one (CCI high), females cooperate significantly more than males. Finally, framing seems to only marginally affect subjects’ cooperative behaviour."

The seminar can be attended also remotely, connecting to ZOOM: https://unive.zoom.us/j/88904871546
ID riunione: 889 0487 1546