Communication and cooperation in prisoner’s dilemma games. (English) Zbl 1492.91054
Summary: We consider a prisoner’s dilemma model with a pre-play communication stage. Players get a disutility from deceiving others after sending a message of conditional cooperation. Each player’s realized lying aversion cost is private information. We prove existence and characterize the (unique) symmetric perfect Bayesian equilibrium that maximizes cooperation. In this distinguished equilibrium, the frequency of cooperation decreases as material gains from lying (or losses from being deceived) increase. We introduce an iterated procedure allowing to characterize the set of rationalizable strategies. We find that cooperation may decrease as a population starts to value honesty more. We extend the model to account for the possibility of a benefit obtained when lying or the effect of the audience size.
MSC:
| 91A28 | Signaling and communication in game theory |
| 91A27 | Games with incomplete information, Bayesian games |
| 91A12 | Cooperative games |
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