Beyond the Shadow of the Future:
How Multiple Teams Alter the Dynamics of Cooperation
Corinne Coen
Reward systems that offer pay and promotion for individual
performance while asking people to work on teams for an equal share of the
collective reward often create a social dilemma for self-interested employees
and thus a disincentive to cooperate. Yet, competition between teams
increases incentives to cooperate within a team, a finding traditionally
attributed to group-interest. This dissertation study attempts to integrate
these two observations by investigating whether self-interest can increase
cooperation in a social dilemma in a multiple team context. It examines
how people who can compare their performance with the performance of members
of other teams alter their decisions to cooperate with their own teammates.
This dissertation innovatively uses multiple methods.
First it addresses issues of validity by combining the results of laboratory
experiments on human subjects with computer simulations. The laboratory
studies confirm that levels of cooperation increase when comparison is favorable
while no significant difference is generated by unfavorable comparisons or
differing amounts of pay. Second, this dissertation employs agent-based
computer simulations to study the dynamics of comparisons in two distinct
ways. One application of agent-based modeling reproduces the laboratory
experiment to find the decision rule that best describes the choices of individual
laboratory subjects. This model shows that a modified reinforcement
rule approximates their decision patterns. The other application of
agent-based modeling explores the effects of comparisons by individuals on
outcomes at the team and multi-team level by modeling teams where all members
apply the reinforcement rule. It reveals that as agents increase in
self-interest a threshold arises over which cooperation levels jump sharply
when the agents are split into two teams but not when they act in a single
team. This dissertation substantiates the role of self-interested comparisons
in increasing cooperation on competing work teams and offers insights for
improving incentive systems by structuring the information flow among members
of multiple teams.