Cooperation in an Assortative Matching Prisoners Dilemma Experiment with Pro-Social Dummies

Abstract

Assortative matching (AM) can be theoretically an effective means to facilitate cooperation. In a controlled lab experiment, we show that adding pro-social dummies may significantly improve cooperation, compared to both the random matching setup and the assortative one without dummies. In society where assortative matching is effective and promoted by the underlying culture, institutional promotion of virtue role models can be interpreted as generating additional pro-social dummies, so as to move the initial state of cooperators into the basin of attraction for a highly cooperative polymorphic equilibrium.