Experimental Results on Bargaining Under Alternatives Property Rights Regimes

The effect of alternative property rights regimes on the choice between taking an object and acquiring it via a consensual exchange is experimentally explored in a two-period screening game. Results are generally consistent with equilibrium predictions, suggesting that property rights regimes have a significant impact on observed behavior

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

(Dis)Advantages of Student Subjects: What is Your Research Question?

In this comment on Henrich et al. (2010) I argue that the right choice of subject pool is intimately linked to the research question. At least within economics, students are often the perfect subject pool for answering some fundamental research questions. Student subject pools can provide an invaluable benchmark for investigating generalizability across different social groups or cultures

An Experimental Investigation of Colonel Blotto Games

"This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support all major theoretical predictions. In the auction treatment, where winning a battlefield is deterministic, disadvantaged players use a 'guerilla warfare' strategy which stochastically allocates zero resources to a subset of battlefields. Advantaged players employ a 'stochastic complete coverage' strategy, allocating random, but positive, resource levels across the battlefields. In the lottery treatment, where winning a battlefield is probabilistic, both players divide their resources equally across all battlefields." (author's abstract)"Dieser Artikel untersucht das Verhalten von Individuen in einem 'constant-sum Colonel Blotto'-Spiel zwischen zwei Spielern, bei dem die Spieler mit unterschiedlichen Ressourcen ausgestattet sind und die erwartete Anzahl gewonnener Schlachtfelder maximieren. Die experimentellen Ergebnisse bestätigen alle wichtigen theoretischen Vorhersagen. Im Durchgang, in dem wie in einer Auktion der Sieg in einem Schlachtfeld deterministisch ist, wenden die Spieler, die sich im Nachteil befinden, eine 'Guerillataktik' an, und verteilen ihre Ressourcen stochastisch auf eine Teilmenge der Schlachtfelder. Spieler mit einem Vorteil verwenden eine Strategie der 'stochastischen vollständigen Abdeckung', indem sie zufällig eine positive Ressourcenmenge auf allen Schlachtfeldern positionieren. Im Durchgang, in dem sich der Gewinn eines Schlachtfeldes probabilistisch wie in einer Lotterie bestimmt, teilen beide Spieler ihre Ressourcen gleichmäßig auf alle Schlachtfelder auf." (Autorenreferat

What happens if you single out? An experiment

We present an experiment investigating the effects of singling out an individual on trust and trustworthiness. We find that (a) trustworthiness falls if there is a singled out subject; (b) non-singled out subjects discriminate against the singled out subject when they are not responsible of the distinct status of this person; (c) under a negative frame, the singled out subject returns significantly less; (d) under a positive frame, the singled out subject behaves bimodally, either selecting very low or very high return rates. Overall, singling out induces a negligible effect on trust but is potentially disruptive for trustworthiness

Full Agreement and the Provision of Threshold Public Goods

The experimental evidence suggests that groups are inefficient at providing threshold public goods. This inefficiency appears to reflect an inability to coordinate over how to distribute the cost of providing the good. So, why do groups not just split the cost equally? We offer an answer to this question by demonstrating that in a standard threshold public good game there is no collectively rational recommendation. We also demonstrate that if full agreement is required in order to provide the public good then there is a collectively rational recommendation, namely, to split the cost equally. Requiring full agreement may, therefore, increase efficiency in providing threshold public goods. We test this hypothesis experimentally and find support for it

Quantum Experimental Data in Psychology and Economics

We prove a theorem which shows that a collection of experimental data of probabilistic weights related to decisions with respect to situations and their disjunction cannot be modeled within a classical probabilistic weight structure in case the experimental data contain the effect referred to as the 'disjunction effect' in psychology. We identify different experimental situations in psychology, more specifically in concept theory and in decision theory, and in economics (namely situations where Savage's Sure-Thing Principle is violated) where the disjunction effect appears and we point out the common nature of the effect. We analyze how our theorem constitutes a no-go theorem for classical probabilistic weight structures for common experimental data when the disjunction effect is affecting the values of these data. We put forward a simple geometric criterion that reveals the non classicality of the considered probabilistic weights and we illustrate our geometrical criterion by means of experimentally measured membership weights of items with respect to pairs of concepts and their disjunctions. The violation of the classical probabilistic weight structure is very analogous to the violation of the well-known Bell inequalities studied in quantum mechanics. The no-go theorem we prove in the present article with respect to the collection of experimental data we consider has a status analogous to the well known no-go theorems for hidden variable theories in quantum mechanics with respect to experimental data obtained in quantum laboratories. For this reason our analysis puts forward a strong argument in favor of the validity of using a quantum formalism for modeling the considered psychological experimental data as considered in this paper.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

Beyond chance? The persistence of performance in online poker

A major issue in the widespread controversy about the legality of poker and the appropriate taxation of winnings is whether poker should be considered a game of skill or a game of chance. To inform this debate we present an analysis into the role of skill in the performance of online poker players, using a large database with hundreds of millions of player-hand observations from real money ring games at three different stakes levels. We find that players whose earlier profitability was in the top (bottom) deciles perform better (worse) and are substantially more likely to end up in the top (bottom) performance deciles of the following time period. Regression analyses of performance on historical performance and other skill-related proxies provide further evidence for persistence and predictability. Simulations point out that skill dominates chance when performance is measured over 1,500 or more hands of play

Sex, Drugs, and Reckless Driving:Are Measures Biased Toward Identifying Risk-Taking in Men?

We investigated whether risk-taking measures inadvertently focus on behaviors that are more normative for men, resulting in the overestimation of gender differences. Using a popular measure of risk-taking (Domain-Specific Risk-Taking) in Study 1 (N = 99), we found that conventionally used behaviors were more normative for men, while, overall, newly developed behaviors were not. In Studies 2 (N = 114) and 3 (N = 124), we demonstrate that differences in normativity are reflected in gender differences in self-reported risk-taking, which are dependent on the specific items used. Study 3 further demonstrates that conventional, masculine risk behaviors are perceived as more risky than newly generated, more feminine items, even when risks are matched. We conclude that there is confirmation bias in risk-taking measurement