Partnership, Reciprocity and Team Design

This paper studies the impact of intention-based reciprocity preferences on the free-riding problem arising in partnerships. Our results suggest a tendency of efficient partnerships to consist of members whose sensitivity to reciprocity is -- individually or jointly -- sufficiently high. Sufficient conditions for the implementation of the efficient strategy profile require a reciprocity based sharing rule such that each partner gets a fraction of the output that is a percentage of his own reciprocity with respect to the overall reciprocity in the team. Finally, we introduce the concept of psychological strong Nash equilibrium and show that it allows for the unique and collusion-proof implementation of the efficient strategy profile.