@article{HeuerOrland2019,
  author    = {Heuer, Leonie and Orland, Andreas},
  title     = {Cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma},
  series = {Royal Society Open Science},
  volume    = {6},
  journal   = {Royal Society Open Science},
  publisher = {Royal Soc. Publ.},
  address   = {London},
  issn      = {2054-5703},
  doi       = {10.1098/rsos.182142},
  pages     = {9},
  year      = {2019},
  abstract  = {Cooperation is — despite not being predicted by game theory — a widely documented aspect of human behaviour in Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) situations. This article presents a comparison between subjects restricted to playing pure strategies and subjects allowed to play mixed strategies in a one-shot symmetric PD laboratory experiment. Subjects interact with 10 other subjects and take their decisions all at once. Because subjects in the mixed-strategy treatment group are allowed to condition their level of cooperation more precisely on their beliefs about their counterparts' level of cooperation, we predicted the cooperation rate in the mixed-strategy treatment group to be higher than in the pure-strategy control group. The results of our experiment reject our prediction: even after controlling for beliefs about the other subjects' level of cooperation, we find that cooperation in the mixed-strategy group is lower than in the pure-strategy group. We also find, however, that subjects in the mixedstrategy group condition their cooperative behaviour more closely on their beliefs than in the pure-strategy group. In the mixed-strategy group, most subjects choose intermediate levels of cooperation.},
  language  = {en}
}