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We study collaborative work in pairs when potential collaborators are motivated by the reputational implications of (joint or solo) projects. In equilibrium, individual collaboration strategies both influence and are influenced by the public assignment of credit for joint work across the two partners. We investigate the fragility of collaboration to small biases in the public’s credit assignment. When collaborators are symmetric, symmetric equilibria are often fragile, and in nonfragile equilibria individuals receive asymmetric collaborative credit based on payoff-irrelevant “identities.” We study payoff distributions across identities within asymmetric equilibria, and compare aggregate welfare across symmetric and asymmetric equilibria. (JEL A11, D82, I23)
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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025
Noise-Tolerant Community Enforcement and the Strength of Small Stakes
We study community enforcement in a large population with noisy monitoring. We focus on equilibria in the prisoner’s dilemma that are coordination proof, meaning that matched partners never play a Pareto-dominated Nash equilibrium in the one-shot game induced by the equilibrium continuation payoffs at their current histories. We show that a noise-tolerant version of contagion strategies is optimal among all coordination-proof equilibria. Welfare under tolerant contagion strategies decreases in the noise level and the gain from defection faster than welfare in a fixed partnership does. Thus, community enforcement has a comparative advantage in supporting “ low-stakes”relationships. (JEL C72, C73, C78, Z13)
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- Award ID(s):
- 2417162
- PAR ID:
- 10616138
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Economic Association
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Economic Review: Insights
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2640-205X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 509 to 525
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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