Game harmony as a predictor of cooperation in 2 x 2 games

Working paper

This paper presents an experimental test of the relationship between game harmony and cooperation in 2 x 2 games. Game harmony measures describe how harmonious (non-conflictual) or disharmonious (conflictual) the interests of players are, as embodied in the payoffs: coordination games and constant-sum games are examples of games of perfect harmony and disharmony, respectively, with most games being somewhere in the middle. In our experiment we consider a variety of 2 x 2 games, including amongst others the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Stag-Hunt, the Chicken, a coordination game and three variants of trust games. We find that simple game harmony measures can explain 2/3 (or more) or the variance in mean cooperation rate across these games.

Authors: Zizzo, D; Tan, J

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: University of Oxford
• Series: Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
• Publication date: 2002-09-01
• Paper number: 117
• Keywords: trust games; 2 x 2 games; game harmony; social dilemmas; cooperation