The Prisoner’s Dilemma as a Two-Level Game: An Experimental Investigation

This paper extends the literature on individual versus group decision-making by combining a strategic inter-group game with an intra-group voting mechanism. The intergroup game is a simple Prisoners’ Dilemma, while we consider two versions of an intragroup voting mechanism—a form of representative democracy and a majority vote. Our results suggest that players tend to be more cooperative in the representative democracy treatment than in the individual Prisoner’s Dilemma. There are also important behavioral differences between the individual Prisoner’s Dilemma and the majority vote treatments—individuals embedded in groups are more inclined to cooperate than subjects making independent decisions. Classification Code: C92