The imperfect hiding : some introductory concepts and preliminary issues on modularity

In this work we present a critical assessment of some problems and open questions on the debated notion of modularity. Modularity is greatly in fashion nowadays, being often proposed as the new approach to complex artefact production that enables to combine fast innovation pace, enhanced product variety and reduced need for co-ordination. In line with recent critical assessments of the managerial literature on modularity, we sustain that modularity is only one among several arrangements to cope with the complexity inherent in most high-technology artefact production, and by no means the best one. We first discuss relations between modularity and the broader (and much older within economics) notion of division of labour. Then we sustain that a modular approach to labour division aimed at eliminating technological interdependencies between components or phases of a complex production process may have, as a by-product, the creation of other types of interdependencies which may subsequently result in inefficiencies of various types. Hence, the choice of a modular design strategy implies the resolution of various tradeoffs. Depending on how such tradeoffs are solved, different organisational arrangements may be created to cope with ‘residual’ interdependencies. Hence, there is no need to postulate a perfect isomorphism, as some recent literature has proposed, between modularity at the product level and modularity at the organisational level

Expectations Structure in Asset Pricing Experiments.

Notwithstanding the recognized importance of traders' expectations in characterizing the observed market dynamics, for instance the formation of speculative bubbles and crashes on financial markets, little attention has been devoted so far by economists to a rigorous study of expectation formation in the laboratory. In this work we describe a laboratory experiment on the emergence and coordination of expectations in a pure exchange framework. We largely base our study on previous experiments on expectation formation in a controlled laboratory environment by Cars Hommes, Joep Sonnemans, Ian Tuinstra and Henk van de Velden (2002a). We consider a simple two asset economy with a riskless bond and a risky stock. Each market is composed of six experimental subjects who act as financial advisors of myopic risk-averse utility maximizing investors and are rewarded according to how well their forecasts perform in the market. The participants are asked to predict not only the price of the risky asset at time t+1, as in Hommes et al. (2002a), but also the confidence interval of their prediction, knowing the past realizations of the price until time t-1. The realized asset price is derived from a Walrasian market equilibrium equation, unknown to the subjects, with feedback from individual forecasts. Subjects' earnings are proportional to the increase in their wealth level. With respect to previous experiments that did not include an explicit evaluation of risk by participants, we observe a higher price volatility, a decreased likelihood of bubble dynamics and, in general, a higher heterogeneity of predictions.

The imperfect hiding: Some introductory concepts and preliminary issues on modularity.

In this work we present a critical assessment of some problems and open questions on the debated notion of modularity. Modularity is greatly in fashion nowadays, being often proposed as the new approach to complex artefact production that enables to combine fast innovation pace, enhanced product variety and reduced need for co-ordination. In line with recent critical assessments of the managerial literature on modularity, we sustain that modularity is only one among several arrangements to cope with the complexity inherent in most high-technology artefact production, and by no means the best one. We first discuss relations between modularity and the broader (and much older within economics) notion of division of labour. Then we sustain that a modular approach to labour division aimed at eliminating technological interdependencies between components or phases of a complex production process may have, as a by-product, the creation of other types of interdependencies which may subsequently result in inefficiencies of various types. Hence, the choice of a modular design strategy implies the resolution of various tradeoffs. Depending on how such tradeoffs are solved, different organisational arrangements may be created to cope with 'residual' interdependencies. Hence, there is no need to postulate a perfect isomorphism, as some recent literature has proposed, between modularity at the product level and modularity at the organisational level.

Classic coordination failures revisited: the effects of deviation costs and loss avoidance

Are communication failures common? We revisit a classic example of experimental coordination failure and explore, in a 2x2 design, the effects of deviation costs and loss avoidance. Our results provide additional insights into the parametric determinants of laboratory coordination failures, and successes.coordination games, Pareto-ranked equilibria, payoff-asymmetric equilibria, optimization incentives, robustness, coordination failure

Games and Phone Numbers: Do Short Term Memory Bounds Affect Strategy Behavior?

Research in experimental and behavioral game theory has revealed a substantial and persistent degree of heterogeneity in the strategic behavior of real individuals. While the prevailing theoretical explanations of the observed heterogeneity typically invoke underlying differences in beliefs among the population of players, we argue that a further source of heterogeneity may consist in the individuals' different ability to process information, of which short term memory capacity provides a measurable proxy. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that individuals typically differ in their short term memory capacity; furthermore, short term memory capacity provides a fundamental cognitive bottleneck to our ability to process information efficiently and hence seems correlated with performance in a variety of problem solving and reasoning tasks. In this paper we conduct experiments on a set of well-known games whose solution concepts require the application of some paradigmatic forms of strategic reasoning, such as iterated dominance, reasoning about common knowledge and backward induction. We separately conduct standard short term memory tests on our subjects to detect the presence of a correlation between individuals' behavior in the games - here defined in terms of degrees of conformity to the standard game-theoretic prescriptions - and their short term memory score. Our results show the presence of a significant and positive correlation between subjects' short term memory score and conformity to standard game-theoretic prescriptions in the games, thus confirming our hypothesis. While the robustness of our conjecture awaits to be confirmed by further data gathering in more interactive experimental settings, our preliminary results suggest a promising line of inquiry on the interconnections between information processing capacity and strategic behavior

You better play 7: mutual versus common knowledge of advice in a weak-link experiment

This paper presents the results of an experiment on mutual versus common knowledge of advice in a two-player weak-link game with random matching. Our experimental subjects play in pairs for thirteen rounds. After a brief learning phase common to all treatments, we vary the knowledge levels associated with external advice given in the form of a suggestion to pick the strategy supporting the payoff- dominant equilibrium. Our results are somewhat surprising and can be summarized as follows: in all our treatments both the choice of the efficiency-inducing action and the percentage of efficient equilibrium play are higher with respect to the control treatment, revealing that even a condition as weak as mutual knowledge of level 1 is sufficient to significantly increase the salience of the efficient equilibrium with respect to the absence of advice. Furthermore, and contrary to our hypothesis, mutual knowledge of level 2 induces, under suitable conditions, successful coordination more frequently than common knowledge

Feature-based Choice and Similarity in Normal-form Games: An Experimental Study

In this paper, we test the effect of descriptive "features" on initial strategic behavior in normal form games, where the term "descriptive" indicates all those features which can be modified without altering the (Nash) equilibrium structure of a game. Our experimental subjects behaved according to some simple heuristics based on descriptive features, and we observed that these heuristics were stable even across strategically different games. These findings indicate the need to incorporate descriptive features into models describing strategic sophistication in normal form games. Analysis of choice patterns and individual behavior indicates that non-equilibrium choices may derive from incorrect and simplified mental representations of the game structure, rather than from beliefs in other players' irrationality. We suggest how level-k and cognitive hierarchy models might be extended to account for heuristic-based and feature-based behavior.normal form games, one-shot games, response times, dominance, similarity, categorization, focal points, individual behavior

The Influence of Experimental and Computational Economics: Economics Back to the Future of Social Sciences

Economics has been a most puzzling science, namely since the neoclassical revolution defined the legitimate procedures for theorisation and quantification. Its epistemology has based on farce: decisive tests are not applied on dare predictions. As a consequence, estimation has finally been replaced by simulation, and empirical tests have been substituted by non-disciplined exercises of comparison of models with reality. Furthermore, the core concepts of economics defy the normally accepted semantics and tend to establish meanings of their own. One of the obvious instances is the notion of rationality, which has been generally equated with the apt use of formal logic or the ability to apply econometric estimation as a rule of thumb for daily life. In that sense, rationality is defined devoid of content, as alien to the construction of significance and reference by reason and social communication. The contradictory use of simulacra and automata, by John von Neumann and Herbert Simon, was a response to this escape of economic models from reality, suggesting that markets could be conceived of as complex institutions. But most mainstream economists did not understand or did not accept these novelties, and the empirical inquiry or the realistic representation of the action of agents and of their social interaction remained a minor domain of economics, and was essentially ignored by canonical theorizing. The argument of the current paper is based on a survey and discussion of the twin contributions of experimental and computational economics to these issues. Although mainly arising out of the mainstream, these emergent fields of economics generate challenging heuristics as well as new empirical results that defy orthodoxy. Their contributions both to the definition of the social meanings of rationality and to the definition of a new brand of inductive economics are discussed.

When and Why? A Critical Survey on Coordination Failure in the Laboratory

Coordination games with Pareto-ranked equilibria have attracted major theoretical attention over the past two decades. Two early path-breaking sets of experimental studies were widely interpreted as suggesting that coordination failure is a common phenomenon in the laboratory. We identify the major determinants that seem to affect the incidence, and/or emergence, of coordination failure in the lab and review critically the existing experimental studies on coordination games with Pareto-ranked equilibria since that early evidence emerged. We conclude that there are many ways to engineer coordination successes.coordination games, Pareto-ranked equilibria, payoff-asymmetric equilibria, staghunt games, optimization incentives, robustness, coordination, coordination failure