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

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

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

Global Public Goods and Global Health

The repair rate on electron beam welded diaphragm hasn’t been at the desired level at Siemens SIT for several years. An improvement program the past five years has reduce the repair rate from 60% to 12-15% but the goal of 5% repair rate hasn’t been met. Collection of diaphragm weld and repair data started in the fall 2011 and in this thesis the material composition of the materials used for the production will be analysed from a statistical perspective. The thesis includes a comprehensive research of the nonparametric statistical methods suitable for non normally distributed, highly kurtotic and skewed data. Unfortunately a lot of statistical tests loose their power to correctly reject a false hypothesis with this kind of data. All of the elements in the material composition and the mechanical properties were analysed individually. In some of the cases it was possible to use statistical methods but in other it was not possible to conclude anything with statistics. Every case of outliers was evaluated individually. The main conclusions are that in all of the four materials there are some elements and mechanical properties outside of the material specifications. A number of cases also had outliers inside of the material specification and in most cases those were causing the variability in the data and had higher repair rates than the overall repair rate. Some trends were found, for example the weld quality was better for lower yield strength in all materials and higher chromium content in material A produced better quality. The first steps to improvement for Siemens are to find out why materials outside of the material specifications are getting all the way to the production without anyone noticing. A simple material process control chart could visually notify if a material is outside of the specification limits or even just outside of the usual. Knowing exactly how the material is before starting the production will give time and space for preventive measures if they are necessary and could improve lead times and decrease costs.För några år har Siemens hatt kvalitetsproblem med Electron Beam svetsing av mellanväggar. Förbättringsprojekt har reducerat reparationer intensivt men fortfarande finns det problemer med svetsningen. Inga mellanväggar lämnar produktionen utan att ha bra kvalitet så att förbättringarna ska fokusera på att reducera produktionskostnader och ledtider. Hösten 2011 började Siemens att samla reparation data för mellanväggarna och i det examens arbetet blir materialsamansättningen analyserad med statistiska metoder. Arbetet innehåller övergripande analysis på non-parametriska statistiska metoder och hur dom funkerar på skevat data med hög kurtosis. Tyvärr finns det inte många metoder som har hög chans att förkasta falska hypoteser när man jobbar med sånt data. Alla elementer och mekaniska egenskaper av materialet blev analyserade, men tyvärr inte alltid med statistiska metoder. Alla extremvärden blev analyserade individuellt. I alla fyra materialer finns det elementer och mekaniska egenskaper utan förmaterialets specifikationer. I vissa fall finns det outliers inom materialets specifikationer men som har högre reparation procent än det vanliga och orsakar variationen i datat. Vissa tendenser kunne hittas, till exempel att det går bättre att svetsa materialer med lägre sträckgräns och högre kromhalt går bättre för material A. Simpelt processstyrningdiagram skulle kunna visa om material är utanför material specifikationen men också om materialet är utanför det ”vanliga”. Att veta exact hur materialet är innan produktion kan sjunka ledtider och produktionskostnader