The Weakest Link - A Field Experiment in Rational Decision Making

We analyze the BBC TV game show "The Weakest Link", using data from 77 episodes, covering 13,380 questions. We focus on the banking decision, where a contestant chooses to secure an amount of money for the eventual winner, or to risk it on a general knowledge question. In the latter case, should he answer correctly, the amount at stake increases exponentially. We show that banking decisions are not rational: a crude rule of thumb performs substantially better than the contestants’ strategies. Yet, at least to some extent, contestants do take into account their own ability and the fact that questions are progressively more difficult.Experimental Economics, TV Game Shows, Bounded Rationality

Tit-for-Tat voting by contestants in the TV quiz-show ‘The Weakest Link’

Background It has not escaped the notice of researchers that TV quiz-shows like ‘The Weakest Link’ (WL) make ideal observational field experiments because they comprise the key ingredients of game theory: a finite group of players must select from a fixed set of actions to play for well defined payoffs. For example, WL has been used to assess the optimal banking strategy in economic decision making (Haan, Los & Riyanto, 2011), the trade-off between risk and return strategies in game playing (Février & Linnemer, 2006; Barmish & Boston, 2009), as a test of gender and race discrimination in voting (Levitt, 2004; Antonovics, Arcidiacono & Walsh, 2005; Goddard, 2012) and to demonstrate ‘neighbour’ effects in voting practice (Goddard, Ashley & Hunter, 2011). Research Questions:- We tested for three kinds of voting bias by players of WL. i.) spatial, ii.) gender and iii.) ‘Tit-for-Tat’ (TFT). Methodology-i.) Rules of WL:- A group of players (n=9) accumulated a pot of money by fielding a first round of questions. Next, each player identified one of their fellows as the ‘weakest’ in that round. The player accruing the majority of votes was summarily eliminated from the show. A second accumulation round of questions preceded another elimination vote, and so on, until the group was whittled down to the final pair, who then played out a tie-breaker to determine an outright winner. Methodology- ii.) Analysis:- The observed frequencies of votes cast in the first and second rounds of 72 episodes of WL were recorded. Simple probability theory was then used to calculate the corresponding expected frequencies due to chance. Significant departures from these expected patterns, identified by χ2 tests, indicated voting bias. Findings:- TFT voting occurred when recipients of round 1 votes responded in kind by voting for the perpetrator in round 2. TFT votes occurred significantly more often than expected, and, significantly more often than those made by the equivalent controls who had not received a vote in round 1. Spatial and gender biases were found: players avoided voting for direct neighbours and females received significantly more votes than males. Interpretation:-We suggest that TFT was played as a deliberate, explicit strategy, but, spatial/gender voting anomalies emerged implicitly. To elaborate, we suggest that a player’s voting decision was informed by two sources of information: situational, the game-specific, public performance of the other players, and, dispositional, their individual, internal, subjective-dependent attributions. In rounds where situational information was unequivocal, so the weakest player was easily identified by the other players (hi-consensus), there was no voting bias. However, significant biases emerged as uncertainty increased (consensus decreased) about the identity of the weakest player. In the absence of clear-cut situational information, because all players performed equally well (or badly!), players resorted to their private, bias-prone dispositional information source. Conclusion:- The format of WL quiz-shows provided an ideal context to analyse forced-choice decision making and the implicit biases and explicit strategies therein

Bias for proximity and gender in the voting patterns of contestants in the TV quiz-show ‘The Weakest Link’

Field studies based on television quiz-shows are free from the kinds of demand characteristics and ethical concerns that can sometimes blight experimental work. Further, they are effectively double-blind, so providing a useful empirical test-bed for theories in social psychology, decision making and economics. The popular TV quiz-show The Weakest Link (WL) has already been used to assess the optimal banking strategy in an analysis of economic decision making (Haan, Los and Riyanto (In press)); as a test of gender and race discrimination in voting practice (Levitt, 2004; Antonovics, Arcidiacono & Walsh, 2005); to investigate the trade-off between risk and return strategies in game playing (Barmish & Boston, 2009); and to show ‘neighbour avoidance’ in first round voting (Goddard, Ashley, Fuller & Hudson, 2011). A similar procedure was used here to measure the voting behaviour of contestants as a function of the proximity of the voter to the candidate voted for and as a function of their gender. The aim was to test for proximity and/or gender biases in voting patterns

Coordination, focal points and voting in strategic situations : a natural experiment

This paper studies coordination in a multi-stage elimination tournament with large monetary incentives and a diversified subject pool drawn from the adult British population. In the tournament, members of an ad hoc team earn money by answering general knowledge questions and then eliminate one contestant by plurality voting without prior communication. We find that in the early rounds of the tournament, contestants use a focal principle and coordinate on one of the multiple Nash equilibria in pure strategies by eliminating the weakest member of the team. However, in the later rounds, contestants switch to playing a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium

Cyber Defense Planning in Tabletop Exercises and Consideration of a Fractured Flaw Theory for Security Applications

Cybersecurity threats endanger every part of American life. Security and emergency preparedness professionals plan and prevent cyber-attacks using tabletop exercises. The tabletop exercises establish the risks and protection strategies for multiagency threats, thus, various agencies and industrial partners must work together in these training events. The purpose of this grounded study will be to develop criteria for selecting tabletop participants and explore the risks of participation. An additional consideration is the impact of the sponsoring agencies\u27 agenda on the value of the outcome for the participants. There is sufficient evidence to justify the investigation of these issues. Failing to include the correct participants has led to significant data breaches in the last few years. Participants may also place themselves in more significant harm through participation. The publication of the outcomes of tabletop exercises, including security gaps, causes grave concerns. The primary theory guiding security concepts is Walodi Weibull\u27s ‘weakest link theory;’ however, the flawed fracture theory may be invaluable as an alternative to the weakest link theory. The study design will qualitatively evaluate recent critical infrastructure exercises. Historical literature reviews and current qualitative efforts (ongoing exercises, action items, interviews, and surveys) provide the basis for improvement. A survey with 39 participants, four in-depth interviews across multiple business sizes, and one federal employee yielded findings related to noncompliance, tabletop baggage, and cascading events. Not having the correct participants leads to weaknesses across tabletop events. Having a missing organization or participant causes complications in response and leads to unrealistic responses. The current consequence of participating in a tabletop exercise was that although participation improved responsiveness and security, smaller partners may face a disproportionate increase in risk. Finally, the agenda, goals, and objectives are all impacted by the tabletop exercise’s sponsor. The prevalence of organizational noncompliance was unexpected. Theoretically, expanding from the weakest link model to the fractured flaw model will significantly improve how security professionals manage risk and survivability. Improving tabletop exercises will enhance the nation\u27s emergency preparedness and potential resiliency

Efficiency Gains from Team-Based Coordination: Large-Scale Experimental Evidence

The need for efficient coordination is ubiquitous in organizations and industries. The literature on the determinants of efficient coordination has focused on individual decision-making so far. In reality, however, teams often have to coordinate with other teams. We present an experiment with 825 participants, using six different coordination games, where either individuals or teams interact with each other. We find that teams coordinate much more efficiently than individuals. This finding adds one important cornerstone to the recent literature on the conditions for successful coordination. We explain the differences between individuals and teams using the experience weighted attraction learning model.coordination games, individual decision-making, team decision-making, experience-weighted attraction learning, experiment

Cooperation Enforcement for Packet Forwarding Optimization in Multi-hop Ad-hoc Networks

Ad-hoc networks are independent of any infrastructure. The nodes are autonomous and make their own decisions. They also have limited energy resources. Thus, a node tends to behave selfishly when it is asked to forward the packets of other nodes. Indeed, it would rather choose to reject a forwarding request in order to save its energy. To overcome this problem, the nodes need to be motivated to cooperate. To this end, we propose a self-learning repeated game framework to enforce cooperation between the nodes of a network. This framework is inspired by the concept of "The Weakest Link" TV game. Each node has a utility function whose value depends on its cooperation in forwarding packets on a route as well as the cooperation of all the nodes that form this same route. The more these nodes cooperate the higher is their utility value. This would establish a cooperative spirit within the nodes of the networks. All the nodes will then more or less equally participate to the forwarding tasks which would then eventually guarantee a more efficient packets forwarding from sources to respective destinations. Simulations are run and the results show that the proposed framework efficiently enforces nodes to cooperate and outperforms two other self-learning repeated game frameworks which we are interested in.Comment: Published in the proceedings of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC 2012), Paris, France, 201

Production of Soybean-Derived Feed Material Free from Salmonella Contamination: An Essential Food Safety Challenge

Soybean meal is the world\u27s most important source of protein for poultry and livestock. Due to frequent contamination of Salmonella, soy is since long unfortunately also found to be a high‐riskfeed material for the introduction of Salmonella to the animal food production. This chapter focuses on the importance of biosecurity and hygiene in the production of soy‐based animal feed. Those strategies and methods found to be effective tools for the production of a Salmonella‐safe soy feed material in crushing plants and feed mills are reviewed and presented. It is also shown that the implementation of those methods at a limited cost can prevent animal feed from being the weakest food safety link in the food chain

Top guns may not fire:Best-shot group contests with group-specific public good prizes

We analyze a group contest in which n groups compete to win a group-specific public good prize. Group sizes can be different and any player may value the prize differently within and across groups. Players exert costly efforts simultaneously and independently. Only the highest effort (the best-shot) within each group represents the group effort that determines the winning group. We fully characterize the set of equilibria and show that in any equilibrium at most one player in each group exerts strictly positive effort. There always exists an equilibrium in which only the highest value player in each active group exerts strictly positive effort. However, perverse equilibria may exist in which the highest value players completely free-ride on others by exerting no effort. We provide conditions under which the set of equilibria can be restricted and discuss contest design implications