The Sources of the Communication Gap

Face-to-face communication drastically increases cooperation rates in social dilemmas. We test which factors are the most important drivers of this communication gap. We distinguish three main categories. First, communication may decrease social distance. Second, communication may enable subjects to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Management science Vol. 63; no. 9; pp. 2832 - 2846
Main Authors: He, Simin, Offerman, Theo, van de Ven, Jeroen
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Linthicum INFORMS 01.09.2017
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
Subjects:
commitment
Communication
Cooperation
Interpersonal communication
Management research
Methods
Organizational communication
prisoner’s dilemma
Social dilemmas
Social distance
Social interaction
type detection
ISSN:0025-1909, 1526-5501
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Face-to-face communication drastically increases cooperation rates in social dilemmas. We test which factors are the most important drivers of this communication gap. We distinguish three main categories. First, communication may decrease social distance. Second, communication may enable subjects to assess their opponent’s cooperativeness (“type detection”) and condition their own action on that information. Third, communication allows subjects to make promises, which create commitment for subjects who do not want to break a promise. We find that communication increases cooperation very substantially. In our experiment, we find that commitment value is an important factor, but the largest part of the increase can be attributed to type detection. We do not find evidence that social distance plays a role. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2518 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, operations management .
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ISSN:0025-1909
1526-5501
DOI:10.1287/mnsc.2016.2518