Pedro Dal Bó Pedro Dal Bo;

In “Do the Right Thing:” The Effects of Moral Suasion on Cooperation with Ernesto Dal Bó, we study experimentally whether and how moral appeals can help sustain cooperation. Moral appeals cause a transitory increase in cooperation in basic public good games, but in the presence of punishment instruments moral appeals have persistent effects. We find that moral suasion works both through expectation and preference-shifting effects.

In Strategy Choice In The Infinitely Repeated Prisoners Dilemma with Guillaume Fréchette, we use a novel experimental design to identify the strategies used by subjects in an infinitely repeated prisoners’ dilemma experiment. We ask subjects to design strategies that will play in their place. The strategies chosen by the subjects include some commonly mentioned strategies, such as tit-for-tat and Grim trigger.

In The Evolutionary Robustness of Forgiveness and Cooperation with Enrique Pujals, we study the evolutionary robustness of strategies in infinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games in which players make mistakes with a small probability and are patient. We show that there are strategies with a uniformly large basin of attraction independent of the size of the population and that those strategies forgive defections and, assuming that they are symmetric, they cooperate.