Social Exchange and the Reciprocity Roller Coaster: Evidence from the Life and Death of Virtual Teams

Organizations are riddled with cooperation problems, that is, instances in which workers need to voluntarily exert effort to achieve efficient collective outcomes. To sustain high levels of cooperation, the experimental literature demonstrates the centrality of reciprocal preferences but has also overlooked some of its negative consequences. In this paper, we ran lab-in-the-field experiments in the context of open-source software development teams to provide the first field evidence that highly reciprocating groups are not necessarily more successful in practice. Instead, the relationship between high reciprocity and performance can be more accurately described as U-shaped. Highly reciprocal teams are generally more likely to fail and only outperform other teams conditional on survival. We use the dynamic structure of our data on field contributions to demonstrate the underlying theoretical mechanism. Reciprocal preferences work as a catalyst at the team level: they reinforce the cooperative equilibrium in good times but also make it harder to recover from a negative signal (the project dies). Our results call into question the idea that strong reciprocity can shield organizations from cooperation breakdowns. Instead, cooperation needs to be dynamically managed through relational contracts.

Carrot or Stick? The Evolution of Reciprocal Preferences in a Haystack Model

We study the evolution of both characteristics of reciprocity: the willingness to reward and the willingness to punish. First, both preferences for rewarding and preferences for punishing can survive provided that individuals interact within separate groups. Second, rewarders survive only in coexistence with self-interested preferences, but punishers either vanish or dominate the population entirely. Third, the evolution of preferences for rewarding and the evolution of preferences for punishing influence each other decisively. Rewarders can invade a population of self-interested players. The existence of rewarders enhances the evolutionary success of punishers, who then crowd out all other preferences. (JEL C71, C72, C73, D64, K42)

COOPERATION AND COMPETITION: LEARNING OF STRATEGIES AND EVOLUTION OF PREFERENCES IN PRISONERS' DILEMMA AND HAWK-DOVE GAMES

By means of simulations I investigate a two-speed dynamic on strategies and preferences in prisoners' dilemmas and in hawk-dove games. Players learn strategies according to their preferences while evolution leads to a change in the preference composition. With complete information about the preferences of the opponent, cooperation in prisoners' dilemmas is achieved temporarily, with "reciprocal" preferences. In hawk-dove games, a symmetric correlated strategy profile is played that does not place any weight on mutual restraint. Among preferences only "hawkish" preferences and "selfish" preferences survive. With incomplete information, the symmetric equilibrium of the game is played. In prisoners' dilemmas only "selfish" and "reciprocal" preferences survive. In hawk-dove games all preferences are present in the medium run.