Unity through rivalry: Alessandro Stringhi publishes in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
Our member Alessandro Stringhi, together with Andrea Albertazzi (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca) and Sara Gil-Gallen (National Research Council of Italy, CNR), has published an article examining how competition between groups can foster cooperation within them, even when winning brings no additional monetary reward.
In a laboratory experiment, participants played an indefinitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma in pairs, either without competition against another pair or in a tournament against one. Winning the tournament brought no additional monetary payoff, yet first-round cooperation increased from 38.7% to 54.9%. The effect also strengthened as participants gained experience: in the final quarter of the experiment, the difference in first-round cooperation exceeded 21 percentage points.
The authors also show how competition changes participants’ strategic behavior: the competitive environment shifts play away from strategies that start with defection, particularly Always Defect, toward cooperative strategies such as Grim. For firms and public institutions, the findings suggest that non-monetary competition between teams can be a cost-effective means of fostering cooperation without financial prizes.
The article was published open access in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (Vol. 248, 2026, Article 107677).