Cooperation is an important area of investigation for behavior analysis. The prisoner’s dilemma game (PDG) provides a useful scenario for studying cooperation in a behavior analytic paradigm. The PDG can be coupled with the concept of the metacontingency to investigate how various contingency arrangements support and promote cooperation in a group. Players in this experiment participated in a PDG and, in some conditions, were given the ability to fine other players but could not talk. The goal of this experiment was to investigate how players’ ability to fine one another affected the players’ patterns of cooperation, and whether fining itself was affected by the addition of a shared group consequence. The data show that participants cooperated in some conditions, but the fines did not seem to affect players’ rates of cooperation.

Separate essays on entrepreneurship, joint venturing, and trade comprise this thesis. The emergence of entrepreneurship is common in the real world but relatively less so in classical economic models. If industry incumbents are attributed with full rationality and perfect foresight, then there are few, if any, profitable opportunities left for new entrants (entrepreneurs) to exploit. This essay explains how entrepreneurs can emerge in a dynamic world when firms must choose between a technology strategy that is either statically or dynamically efficient. A model is developed which shows how such opportunities for new entry can occur when incumbents are caught in a Prisoners’ Dilemma game involving technology strategy. A relevance measure and policy implications are then explored. Joint ventures, especially of the R&D type, are becoming increasingly important as a way to gain needed technological and market competencies. Unfortunately, many joint ventures have the characteristics of a Prisoners’ Dilemma. Firms may cooperate or defect in the venture. If contracts, side-payments, and third-party verification of the venture outcome are unavailable, then the dominant solution to the Prisoners’ Dilemma (mutual defection) results. This paper proposes the use of an ex-ante auction to obtain a Pareto-improvement for these ventures. A Pareto-improvement is assured when non-transferable costs and benefits of firms are not conditional on joint venture strategies. When this condition is not met restrictions are required to obtain the Pareto-improvement. The problem of trade between countries that share an international open access resource is becoming significant as the world reaches the limits of critical shared resource stocks. It is modelled as a world with one primary factor, two intermediate goods, one final good (harvested from the open access resource), and two nations where it is assumed that either the trading takes place over one stage (nations are price-takers), or two stages (nations have market power). Imperfect competition and open access generated externalities affect the trading efficiency. To maximize world welfare this essay recommends subsidizing R&D where comparative advantage exists, and creating international agreements to ensure the one-stage game structure is used when trading.

Separate essays on entrepreneurship, joint venturing, and trade comprise this thesis. The emergence of entrepreneurship is common in the real world but relatively less so in classical economic models. If industry incumbents are attributed with full rationality and perfect foresight, then there are few, if any, profitable opportunities left for new entrants (entrepreneurs) to exploit. This essay explains how entrepreneurs can emerge in a dynamic world when firms must choose between a technology strategy that is either statically or dynamically efficient. A model is developed which shows how such opportunities for new entry can occur when incumbents are caught in a Prisoners’ Dilemma game involving technology strategy. A relevance measure and policy implications are then explored. Joint ventures, especially of the R&D type, are becoming increasingly important as a way to gain needed technological and market competencies. Unfortunately, many joint ventures have the characteristics of a Prisoners’ Dilemma. Firms may cooperate or defect in the venture. If contracts, side-payments, and third-party verification of the venture outcome are unavailable, then the dominant solution to the Prisoners’ Dilemma (mutual defection) results. This paper proposes the use of an ex-ante auction to obtain a Pareto-improvement for these ventures. A Pareto-improvement is assured when non-transferable costs and benefits of firms are not conditional on joint venture strategies. When this condition is not met restrictions are required to obtain the Pareto-improvement. The problem of trade between countries that share an international open access resource is becoming significant as the world reaches the limits of critical shared resource stocks. It is modelled as a world with one primary factor, two intermediate goods, one final good (harvested from the open access resource), and two nations where it is assumed that either the trading takes place over one stage (nations are price-takers), or two stages (nations have market power). Imperfect competition and open access generated externalities affect the trading efficiency. To maximize world welfare this essay recommends subsidizing R&D where comparative advantage exists, and creating international agreements to ensure the one-stage game structure is used when trading. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

<p>This dissertation is a collection of three papers, each one being a chapter. The running subject of interest in all the papers is the strategic behavior of individuals in different environments. In the first chapter, I experimentally investigate collusive behavior under simultaneous interaction in multiple strategic settings, a phenomenon which I call multiple contacts. I investigate how multiple contacts impact collusive behavior when the players are symmetric or asymmetric. The second chapter is a joint work with Dr. Brian Roberson. In this chapter, we examine the role of cognitive diversity in teams on performance in a large innovation contest setting. We use a theoretical model to derive conditions under which increasing diversity can improve the performance in the large contest. Finally, in the third chapter, a joint work with Dr. Yaroslav Rosokha and Dr. Masha Shunko, we experimentally study players' behavior when they interact in an infinitely repeated environment, where the state of the world in each period is stochastic and dependent on a transition rule. Our main questions are how the transition rule impacts behavior and whether asymmetry in players impacts this.</p> <p><br></p> <p>In the first chapter, I study the phenomenon of multiple contacts using a laboratory experiment with multiple symmetric or asymmetric prisoners' dilemma games. When agents interact in multiple settings, even if defection or deviation from collusion in one setting can not be credibly punished in the same setting, it may be punishable in other settings. This can increase the incentive to collude. I observe a statistically significant increase in probability of punishment in one game after defection in another game under multiple contacts, but only when the games are asymmetric in payoffs. While punishment of defection increases in some situations, I do not find any significant increase in collusion due to multiple contacts in either symmetric or asymmetric environment. In addition to this result, to find further support for the theory which suggests that agents should use different strategies under multiple contacts, I estimate the underlying strategies that subjects use in my experiment. To this end, I modify popular strategies (e.g., Grim Trigger, Tit-for-Tat, etc.) to condition on the history observed in multiple strategic settings. I find that only for games with asymmetric payoffs subjects use these modified strategies in the presence of multiple contacts.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The second chapter is a theoretical work. In our model of large team innovation contest, teams develop an innovation using the skills or perspectives (tools) belonging to individual team members and the costly effort they provide.</p> <p>Prizes are awarded based on the values of the teams' innovations. Within a team, the team members posses different skills or perspectives (tools) which may be applied to innovation problems. For a given innovation problem and a given level of team effort, different combinations of tools within a team may generate different values for the team innovation. In this context, we examine the issues of individual team performance as a function of a team's own composition and the overall performance of the contest as a function of the compositions of the teams. We find that the question of whether increasing diversity leads to an increase in expected performance, for both an individual team and the overall contest, depends on the efficiency with which teams are able to effectively apply diverse sets of tools to innovation problems. Thus, our paper provides a channel -- other than a direct cost of diversity -- through which diversity can be beneficial or detrimental depending on how efficient teams are at utilizing diverse sets of team member tools.</p> <p><br></p> <p>The final chapter is another experimental study. We study an enviroment where individuals interact with each other in a prisoners' dilemma game repeatedly over time. However, the payoffs of the prisoners' dilemma game is decided stochastically using a transition rule. We vary the transition rule from alternation to random and study the change in subject behavior when the interaction is either symmetric or asymmetric. Our results show that in asymmetric environment, alternation can improve cooperation rates.</p> <p>With random transition rule, symmetric environment is more conducive to cooperation. We find that asymmetric environment with random transition rules performs the worst in terms of cooperation rates.</p>

為瞭解兒童在認知發展行為的表現，本研究招募國小一年級學童56名，五年級學童32名參與實驗進行。應用囚犯困境賽局與最後通牒賽局之架構設計兩個遊戲，來檢測兒童在合作與分享行為之表現。分析受試者之背叛比率、提供數量、拒絕比率等實驗資料，來檢測年齡、性別以及長幼關係是否會造成顯著影響。 實驗結果發現： （1）年齡較大兒童較傾向較合作且拒絕比率較低，這個結果和認知發展理論的結論一致。 （2）受試者資料在性別效果的假設檢定結果都不顯著。 （3）年齡較小兒童的平均提供數量都大於一半，這個結果和最後通牒賽局的理論預測相反。（4）對手為不同年齡時的背叛比率和拒絕比率都比對手為同年齡時低，這個結果支持國小開設混齡教育課程。 / This paper studies children’s behavior in an ultimatum game and a prisoner’s dilemma game with 56 children of age 7 and 32 children of age 11. With the experimental data of defect ratio, offer quantity and rejection ratio, we tested the age, sex and seniority effects under these two games. The experimental findings are as follows. （1）The older children are more cooperative and have lower rejection ratio than younger ones. These results are consistent with the developmental psychology theories. （2） We observe no significant sex effect in the three tests. （3） For younger children, the average offer quantity is higher than fifty percent, this is different from theoretical prediction and literature results.（4）We found that for pairs consisting of subjects of different ages, The defect ratio and rejection ratio are lower than pairs of the same age subjects. This evidence may provide support for mixed-age education program for some courses in elementary school.