Cooperation in a Game of Chicken with Heterogeneous Agents: An Experimental Study

Using a two-stage Game of Chicken, Cabon-Dhersin and Ramani (2007) examine the impact of population heterogeneity on cooperative behaviour. For that purpose, they introduce two different types of agents, namely those who always cooperate and those who strategically cooperate. The aim of the present experimental study is to investigate the descriptive accuracy of the one-stage version of this model. Even though the level of cooperation appears to be much higher than predicted, our data bring strong support to the main predictions that the structure of the population as well as the structure of the payoffs affect cooperative behaviour.