Learning, Teaching, and Turn Taking in the Repeated Assignment Game

History-dependent strategies are often used to support cooperation in repeated game models. Using the indefinitely repeated common-pool resource assignment game and a perfect stranger experimental design, this paper reports novel evidence that players who have successfully used an efficiency-enhancing turn-taking strategy will teach other players in subsequent supergames to adopt this strategy. We find that subjects engage in turn taking frequently in both the Low Conflict and the High Conflict treatments. Prior experience with turn taking significantly increases turn taking in both treatments. Moreover, successful turn taking often involves fast learning, and individuals with turn taking experience are more likely to be teachers than inexperienced individuals. The comparative statics results show that teaching in such an environment also responds to incentives, since teaching is empirically more frequent in the Low Conflict treatment with higher benefits and lower costs.Learning, Teaching, Assignment Game, Laboratory Experiment, Repeated Games, Turn Taking, Common-Pool Resources

Learning, teaching, and turn taking in the repeated assignment game

History-dependent strategies are often used to support cooperation in repeated game models. Using the indefinitely repeated common-pool resource assignment game and a perfect stranger experimental design, this paper reports novel evidence that players who have successfully used an efficiency-enhancing turn taking strategy will teach other players in subsequent supergames to adopt this strategy. We find that subjects engage in turn taking frequently in both the Low Conflict and the High Conflict treatments. Prior experience with turn taking significantly increases turn taking in both treatments. Moreover, successful turn taking often involves fast learning, and individuals with turn taking experience are more likely to be teachers than inexperienced individuals. The comparative statics results show that teaching in such an environment also responds to incentives, since teaching is empirically more frequent in the Low Conflict treatment with higher benefits and lower costs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.postprin

The Organizational Design of Intelligence Failures

While the detection, and prevention, of the September 11, 2001 plot would have been ideal, I argue that the more major intelligence failures occurred after the attacks of September 11. The erroneous intelligence concerning the WMD presence in Iraq permitted the Bush Administration to order the invasion of Iraq. Systematic underestimates of the budgetary costs and personnel requirements of the war meant that Congress did not give the matter the debate that it warranted. Finally, incorrect (or incomplete) intelligence concerning the extent of the informal opposition to the U.S. led forces resulted in inadequate numbers of allied forces being deployed and a protracted period of conflict and disruption in Iraq. These facts are all well known to anyone who reads newspapers. I make three arguments in this paper. First, the collection of the intelligence data and its evaluation does not occur in a vacuum. There must always be an organizing theory that motivates the collection and evaluation of the data and that this theory is formulated at the highest levels of the decision making process. Second, it is not possible to construct a truly neutral or objective (analytical) hierarchy. Third, it is impossible to separate the analytical evaluation of the data from the decision that will be based on such evaluation. As an inevitable consequence of these arguments, intelligence analysis and the resulting conclusions are driven by top-down considerations rather than bottom-up as has been argued by some reviewers of recent intelligence failures. Key Words: stable coalitions, self-enforcing agreements, compliance, enforcement, public goods

Nudging Cooperation in a Crowd Experiment

We examine the hypothesis that driven by a competition heuristic, people don't even reflect or consider whether a cooperation strategy may be better. As a paradigmatic example of this behavior we propose the zero-sum game fallacy, according to which people believe that resources are fixed even when they are not. We demonstrate that people only cooperate if the competitive heuristic is explicitly overridden in an experiment in which participants play two rounds of a game in which competition is suboptimal. The observed spontaneous behavior for most players was to compete. Then participants were explicitly reminded that the competing strategy may not be optimal. This minor intervention boosted cooperation, implying that competition does not result from lack of trust or willingness to cooperate but instead from the inability to inhibit the competition bias. This activity was performed in a controlled laboratory setting and also as a crowd experiment. Understanding the psychological underpinnings of these behaviors may help us improve cooperation and thus may have vast practical consequences to our society.Fil: Niella, Tamara. Universidad Torcuato di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Stier, Nicolas. Universidad Torcuato di Tella; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Sigman, Mariano. Universidad Torcuato di Tella; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Social Preferences Among Clinicians in Tanzania: Evidence from the Lab and the Field

Health worker effort can have a dramatic influence on patient outcomes. This is especially true in developing countries, where poor overall quality of healthcare systems is the norm. There is evidence, however, that despite low levels of education and experience, clinicians in Tanzania underperform relative to their ability (Leonard and Masatu, 2005). Understanding clinicians' intrinsic motivations may help us identify nonmonetary incentives for improving quality of care. To this end, this dissertation considers how risk, pride and social information impact altruism among Tanzanian clinicians. In Chapter 4, we study how risky environments impact social preferences. With experimental evidence from games with risky outcomes, we establish that social preferences of players who give in standard dictator games are best described by consideration of equating ex ante chances to win rather than of ex post payoffs. The more money decision-makers transfer in the dictator game, the more likely they are to equalize payoff chances under risk. Risk to the recipient does, however, generally decrease the transferred amount. Also, while some people behave generously regardless of the attributes of others, pride and knowledge about the recipient characteristics may also motivate altruistic behavior. In Chapter 5, we explore the role of social information and pride in determining pro-social behavior among clinicians in Tanzania. We find that making someone feel proud increases the number of "fair" allocations (50/50 giving) and that those who do not respond to decreased partner anonymity are less responsive to induced pride. Chapter 6 combines laboratory data on social preferences and field data on clinicians' workplace effort. This study is unique in that we observe the same subjects from the laboratory in a field setting, where pro-social behavior has large welfare impacts. We use modified dictator games to define subjects as fair types, social information responsive types and pride responsive types and test how those characteristics are correlated with effort in the workplace. We find that clinicians responsive to both pride and social information provide higher than average effort in the workplace. These results are suggestive of Ellingsen and Johannesson's (2008) theory of social preferences wherein social identity and esteem interact to motivate altruism

Choice Flexibility and Long-Run Cooperation

Understanding how incentives and institutions help scaling up cooperation is important, especially when strategic uncertainty is considerable. Evidence suggests that this is challenging even when full cooperation is theoretically sustainable thanks to indefinite repetition. In a controlled social dilemma experiment, we show that adding partial cooperation choices to the usual binary choice environment can raise cooperation and efficiency. Under suitable incentives, partial cooperation choices enable individuals to cheaply signal their desire to cooperate, reducing strategic uncertainty. The insight is that richer choice sets can form the basis of a language meaningful for coordinating on cooperation

Do Economic Inequalities Affect Long-Run Cooperation & Prosperity?

We explore if fairness and inequality motivations affect cooperation in indefinitely repeated games. Each round, we randomly divided experimental participants into donor-recipient pairs. Donors could make a gift to recipients, and ex-ante earnings are highest when all donors give. Roles were randomly reassigned every period, which induced inequality in ex-post earnings. Theoretically, income-maximizing players do not have to condition on this inequality because it is payoff-irrelevant. Empirically, payoff-irrelevant inequality affected participants’ ability to coordinate on efficient play: donors conditioned gifts on their own past roles and, with inequalities made visible, discriminated against those who were better off