Abstract
The disagreement between Binmore and the “behaviouralists” concerns mainly the kind of reciprocity mechanisms that sustain cooperation in and out of the experimental laboratory. Although Binmore’s scepticism concerning Strong Reciprocity is justified, his case for Weak Reciprocity and the long-run convergence to Nash equilibria is unsupported by laboratory evidence. Part of the reason is that laboratory evidence alone cannot solve the reciprocity controversy, and researchers should pay more attention to field data. As an example, I briefly illustrate a historical case suggesting that the institutions that foster cooperation in the real world rely on Weak Reciprocity mechanisms such as those that feature prominently in Binmore’s story.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This does not mean that experimental artefacts are scientifically uninteresting or, even worse, “unreal”. Cooperation and fair behaviour can be very real, and yet artefactual, experimental phenomena: they exist in the lab, but are triggered by mechanisms that rarely occur in the “outside world” (see Guala 2005: 93–96).
This reformist zeal distinguishes “behavioural” from “experimental” economists: while the former have a specific theoretical mission, the latter are only committed to the use of laboratory experiments in economics. Many behavioural economists, of course, are also experimental economists.
While Binmore has targeted theories of inequality aversion in particular, I do not think they are the true bone of contention in the reciprocity debate. SR theorists say explicitly that inequality aversion models are almost certainly false, and that the true underlying mechanisms involve social norms sustained by SR motives. This does not mean that the critiques of Binmore and Shaked (2010) are unwarranted (on the contrary, they are well-taken in my view) but only that they make a big deal of what is scientifically a relatively small matter.
Binmore claims rather bizarrely that “the stress placed on adaptation … is absent from the work of behavioural economists”. Perhaps there are no models or simulations that produce adaptation to the particular equilibria that he likes, but there are many demonstrations that across a range of circumstances fair division can evolve in the repeated Ultimatum game, or that cooperation can be stable in repeated Public Goods games (Skyrms 1996; Boyd and Richerson 1992; Gintis 2000; Henrich and Boyd 2001; Boyd et al. 2003; Bowles and Gintis 2004; Alexander 2007).
Another source of interesting field data is anthropologists’ accounts of cooperative behaviour in small acephalous societies of hunter-gatherers. I do not discuss this evidence here because Binmore is one of the few economists who cites the anthropological literature correctly and draws the right implications. The casual references to cooperative behaviour in small societies found in SR theorists’ papers are quite astonishing for superficiality and lack of critical understanding (see Guala 2010 for an extended survey).
Smaller villages and communities in the most remote valleys of Trentino, for example, were less likely to adopt a charter than larger villages and communities in accessible and difficult-to-monitor locations (see Casari 2007: 209–213).
Elinor Ostrom’s life-long research on common-pool institutions can be considered an ideal model in this respect, mixing a variety of methodological approaches and sources of evidence that complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses. For a methodologically oriented survey, see Poteete et al. (2010).
References
Alexander JM (2007) The structural evolution of morality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Binmore K (1998) Game theory and the social contract II: Just playing. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass
Binmore K (1999) Why experiment in economics? Econ J 109:F16–F24
Binmore K (2005) Natural justice. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Binmore K (2006) Why do people cooperate? Polit. Philos Econ 5:81–96
Binmore K, Shaked A (2010) Experimental economics: where next? J Econ Behav Organ 73:87–100
Bowles S, Gintis H (2004) The evolution of strong reciprocity: cooperation in heterogeneous populations. Theor Popul Biol 65:17–28
Boyd R, Richerson P (1992) Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups. Ethol Sociobiol 13:171–195
Boyd R, Gintis H, Bowles S, Richerson P (2003) The evolution of altruistic punishment. PNAS 100:3531–3535
Burlando RM, Guala F (2005) Heterogeneous agents in public goods experiments. Exp Econ 8:35–54
Burnham TC, Johnson DP (2005) The biological and evolutionary logic of human cooperation. Anal Kritik 27:113–135
Casari M (2007) Emergence of endogenous legal institutions: property rights and community governance in the Italian Alps. J Econ Hist 67:191–226
Cooper DJ, Dutcher EG (2009) The dynamics of responder behavior in ultimatum games: a meta-study, working paper. Florida State University
Fischbacher U, Gachter S, Fehr E (2001) Are people conditionally cooperative? evidence from a public goods experiment. Econ Lett 71:397–404
Fudenberg D, Levin DK, Maskin E (1994) The Folk theorem with imperfect public information. Econometrica 62:997–1039
Gachter S, Thoni C (2005) Social learning and voluntary cooperation among like-minded people. J Eur Econ Assoc 3:303–314
Gintis H (2000) Strong reciprocity and human sociality. J Theor Biol 206:169–179
Gintis H (2006) Behavioral ethics meets natural justice, politics. Philos Econ 5:5–32
Gintis H (2009) The bounds of reason: game theory and the unification of the behavioral sciences. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Guala F (2005) The methodology of experimental economics. Cambridge University Press, New York
Guala F (2010) Reciprocity: weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate, DEAS working paper 2010–23, University of Milan
Hagen EH, Hammerstein P (2006) Game theory and human evolution: a critique of some recent interpretations of experimental games. Theor Popul Biol 69:339–348
Henrich J, Boyd R (2001) Why people punish defectors: weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas. J Theor Biol 208:79–89
Ostrom E (1990) Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press, New York
Ostrom E (2000) Collective action and the evolution of social norms. J Econ Perspect 14:137–158
Page T, Putterman L, Unel B (2005) Voluntary association in public goods experiments: reciprocity, mimicry, and efficiency. Econ J 115:1032–1053
Poteete AR, Jaansen MA, Ostrom E (2010) Working together: collective action, the commons, and multiple methods in practice. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Ross D (2006) Evolutionary game theory and the normative theory of institutional design: Binmore and behavioral economics. Polit Philos Econ 5:51–79
Roth A, Prasnikar V, Okuno-Fujiwara M, Zamir S (1991) Bargaining and market behavior in Jerusalem, Lubljana, Pittsburgh and Tokyo: an experimental study. Am Econ Rev 81:1068–1095
Skyrms B (1996) Evolution of the social contract. Cambridge University Press, New York
Trivers RL (1971) The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Q Rev Biol 46:35–57
Trivers RL (2004) Behavioural evolution: mutual benefits at all levels of life. Science 304:964–965
Acknowledgments
Nick Bardsley’s comments on an earlier draft are gratefully acknowledged.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Guala, F. Cooperation in and out of the lab: a comment on Binmore’s paper. Mind Soc 9, 159–169 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-010-0077-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-010-0077-y