Tag Archives | Norm Enforcement

Sharing Compromising Information as a Cooperative Strategy

Diego Gambetta, Wojtek Przepiorka

Sociological Science, May 8, 2019
10.15195/v6.a14


Well-enforced norms create an opportunity for norm breakers to cooperate in ventures requiring trust. This is realized when norm breakers, by sharing evidence of their breaches, make themselves vulnerable to denunciation and therefore trustworthy. The sharing of compromising information (SCI) is a strategy employed by criminals, politicians, and other actors wary of their partners’ trustworthiness in which the cost of ensuring compliance is offloaded on clueless norm enforcers. Here we introduce SCI as a sui generis cooperative strategy and test its functioning experimentally. In our experiment, subjects first acquire the label “dove” or “hawk” depending on how cooperative or uncooperative they are, respectively. Hawks acquire compromising information embodied in their label and can reveal it before an interaction with trust at stake. Unlike doves, hawks who reveal their label make themselves vulnerable to their partners, who can inflict a penalty on them after interaction. We find that even students in as artificial a setting as a computerized decision laboratory grasp the advantage of SCI and use it to cooperate. Our results corroborate the idea that compromising information can be conceived as a “hostage” that, when mutually exchanged, makes each party to the interaction vulnerable and therefore trustworthy in joint endeavours.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Diego Gambetta: Collegio Carlo Alberto, Università di Torino
E-mail: diego.gambetta@carloalberto.org

Wojtek Przepiorka: Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
E-mail: w.przepiorka@uu.nl

Acknowledgements: Both authors contributed equally to this work and thank Ozan Aksoy, Maria Bigoni, Manfred Milinski, and Werner Raub for their helpful comments on earlier versions. D. G. gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Research Council of the European University Institute.

  • Citation: Gambetta, Diego, and Wojtek Przepiorka. 2019. “Sharing Compromising Information as a Cooperative Strategy.” Sociological Science 6: 352-379.
  • Received: February 20, 2019
  • Accepted: March 20, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a14


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