Competition and Cooperation in markets. The experimental case of a winner-take-all setting

The aim of this experiment is twofold. First of all, we want to investigate whether a winner-take-all scenario where subjects with homogeneous skills meet more than once stimulates subjects' cooperation. Secondly, we want to compare agents' tendency to cooperate in settings with different levels of competition. We ran three treatments. The first one reproduces the classical public good game. The second environment represents a perfect competition market, while in the third treatment we consider a winner-take-all market. The most relevant result we obtain is that while perfect competition forces players to be efficient and to behave as they were self-interested, a winner-take-all market induces strategic cooperation.

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