Data and code from: Cooperation and coordination in heterogeneous populations

One landmark application of evolutionary game theory is the study of social dilemmas. This literature explores why people cooperate even when there are strong incentives to defect. Much of this literature, however, assumes that interactions are symmetric. Individuals are assumed to have the same strategic options and the same potential payoffs. Yet many interesting questions arise once individuals are allowed to differ. Here, we study asymmetry in simple coordination games. In our setup, human participants need to decide how much of their endowment to contribute to a public good. If a group's collective contributions reach a pre-defined threshold, all group members receive a reward. To account for possible asymmetries, individuals either differ in their endowments or their productivities. According to our theoretical equilibrium analysis, such games tend to have many possible solutions. In equilibrium, group members may contribute the same amount, different amounts, or nothing at all. According to the behavioral experiment, however, humans favor the equilibrium in which everyone contributes the same proportion of their endowment. We use these experimental results to highlight the nontrivial effects of inequality on cooperation, and we discuss to which extent models of evolutionary game theory can account for these effects.