Human players manage to extort more than the mutual cooperation payoff in repeated social dilemmas

Social dilemmas are mixed-motive games. Although the players have a common interest in maintaining cooperation, each may try to obtain a larger payoff by cooperating less than the other. This phenomenon received increased attention after Press and Dyson discovered a class of strategies for the repeated prisoner’s dilemma (extortionate strategies) that secure for themselves a payoff that is never smaller, but can be larger, than the opponent’s payoff. We conducted an experiment to test whether humans adopt extortionate strategies when playing a social dilemma. Our results reveal that human subjects do try to extort a larger payoff from their opponents. However, they are only successful when extortionate strategies are part of a Nash equilibrium. In settings where extortionate strategies do not appear in any Nash equilibrium, attempts at extortion only result in a breakdown of cooperation. Our subjects recognized the different incentives implied by the two settings, and they were ready to “extort” the opponent when allowed to do so. This suggests that deviations from mutually cooperative equilibria, which are usually attributed to players’ impatience, coordination problems, or lack of information, can instead be driven by subjects trying to reach more favorable outcomes.