A recent study by David Melamed and his colleagues examined whether the emergent structures that promote cooperation are driven by reputation or can emerge purely via dynamics. To answer the research question, they recruited 1,979 Amazon Mechanical Turkers and asked them to play an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game. Further, these participants were randomly assigned one of 16 experimental conditions. Results of the experiments show that dynamic networks yield high rates of cooperation even without reputational knowledge. Additionally, the study found that the targeted choice condition in static networks yields cooperation rates as high as those in dynamic networks.
The original article is available here.
