Jacoby, Nori

Getting a group to adopt cooperative norms is an enduring challenge. Such cooperation is even harder for groups that interact across multiple environments. Groups of strangers often have to attain cooperative outcomes across a range of environments. We introduce a laboratory setting to test if groups can guide themselves to cooperative outcomes by manipulating the environmental parameters that shape their own emergent cooperation process. We test for cooperation in a set of games that impose different social dilemmas. These games vary in stability, efficiency, "alignment", and fairness. By offering agency over behavior along with second-order agency over the rules of the game, we understand emergent cooperation in naturalistic settings in which the rules of the game are themselves dynamic. The literature on transfer learning in games suggest that interactions between features are important and might aid or hinder the transfer of cooperative learning to new settings.