Learning to cooperate in the shadow of the law

Roberto Galbiati (1, 2) , Emeric Henry (1, 2) , Nicolas Jacquemet (3, 4)

1 ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po)
2 CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research
3 CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne
4 PSE - Paris School of Economics

How does the exposure to past institutions affect current cooperation? While a growing literature focuses on behavioral channels, we show how cooperation-enforcing institutions affect rational learning about the group’s value. Strong institutions, by inducing members to cooperate, may hinder learning about intrinsic values in the group. We show, using a lab experiment with independent interactions and random rematching, that participants behave in accordance with a learning model, and in particular react differently to actions of past partners whether they were played in an environment with coercive enforcement or not.

Mots clés: Enforcement; Social values; Cooperation; Learning; Spillovers; Persistence of institutions; Repeated games; Experiments

Domaines: Economies et finances

Roberto Galbiati, Emeric Henry, Nicolas Jacquemet. Learning to cooperate in the shadow of the law. 2019. ⟨hal-03393094v2⟩