COVID-19 Dilemma: The Effect of Polarized Information on Cooperative Behavior

Inspired by the phenomenon of panic buying in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper studies the effect of information cherry-picked to signal cooperation or noncooperation on outcomes of Prisoner’s Dilemma games. The study explores the question of how presenting polarized pieces of information before decision making affects subjects’ behavior using anonymous, randomly-matched, one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma games conducted virtually on Amazon Mechanical Turk.  With a sample size of 243 observations, the study finds that positive information aimed to increase confidence in cooperation does not have any significant relationship with Prisoner’s Dilemma games’ outcomes. On the other hand, the data suggests that when subjects were presented with a negative piece of information lowering their confidence in cooperative behavior, they were 14.6 percentage points less likely to cooperate, compared to people in the control group who did not receive any information other than the Dilemma’s rules. The study also finds that certain income brackets, panic buying experience during COVID-19, and taking care of a dependent have positive relationships with cooperative behavior.