How economic rewards affect cooperation reconsidered

Recent studies suggest that payoffs in cents, compared to dollars, produce less defection in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma game. We are unable to replicate these findings with conventional economic procedures or in a direct replication. •We investigate manipulating numeric values of payoffs in prisoner’s dilemma games.•We cannot replicate earlier results showing behavior is sensitive to such changes.•We explore the role of differences in experimental procedures on reported results.•Monetary incentives generate higher cooperation rates than in their absence.