Alberto Antonioni (Carlos III University of Madrid) will give a guest talk on 23th October with the title “Reputation and the influence of hierarchy in networked cooperative interactions: experimental evidence”. It will take place at 10:30 am in AND 4.57, Andreasstrasse 15, Zurich

Abstract: We all need to rely on cooperation with other individuals in many aspects of everyday life, such as teamwork and economic exchange in anonymous markets. In this seminar I will present some empirical evidence from human experiments carried out in a controlled laboratory setting which focus on the impact of reputation in dynamic networked interactions. People are engaged in playing pairwise Prisoner’s Dilemma games with their neighbours and they are paid with real money according to their performance during the experiment. We will see whether and how the ability to make or break links in social networks fosters cooperation, paying particular attention to whether information on an individual’s actions is freely available to potential partners. Studying the role of information is relevant as complete knowledge on other people’s actions is often not available for free. We will also focus on the role of individual reputation, an indispensable tool to guide decisions about social and economic interactions with individuals otherwise unknown, and in the way this reputation is obtained in a hierarchical structure. These findings point to the importance of ensuring the truthfulness of reputation for a more cooperative and fair society.