Learning from the experience of others: an experiment on information contagion

Advances in stochastic system analysis have opened the way to a reconsideration of the processes through which behaviors spread in a population of individuals or organizations. One peculiar phenomenon affecting diffusion is information contagion (Arthur and Lane 1994). When agents have to choose on the basis of other people’s experience, rather than relying on their own direct observations, information externalities arise that drive towards the emergence of the arbitrary, stable dominance of one product over the competing one. We reproduced in controlled laboratory conditions the process of information contagion. The experiments show that when agents can only resort to the observation of other people’s experience in choosing between competing alternatives, the choice process generates some peculiar features: - information contagion among subjects generates self-reinforcing dynamics, amplifying initial asymmetries of products’ market shares; - this in turn produces path-dependent trajectories, highly dependent on early events in the choice sequence; - arbitrary asymmetric market shares tend to be stable in the long run, exhibiting lock-in phenomena; - agents choice criteria are heterogenous, giving rise to a mix of positive and negative feedback in the choice process, with the mix and the timing of such criteria affecting the final outcome

An experimental investigation of fairness and reciprocal behavior in a triangular principal-multiagent relationship

Issues of fairness in hierarchies have been mostly investigated - both theoretically and experimentally - within dyadic principle-agent relationships. In this paper we consider triangular principal-multiagents structures, integrating vertical hierarchical relationships with horizontal agent-to-agent ones. We explore in the laboratory a game that allows to investigate how principal's fairness affects cooperation between two interdependent agents performing a simple production task. Our experimental findings show that perceived fairness of principal's actions may trigger reciprocation in agent's behavior, affecting how agents play the production game

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

An Experimental Investigation of Fairness and Reciprocal Behavior in a Triangular Principal'-Multiagent Relationship.

A laboratory investigation of a simple agency model that allow to study how the principal's fairness affects the attitude towards cooperation between two interdependent agents performing a simple production task.principal-agent theory; prisoner's dilemma; reciprocity; fairness; experimental economics

The importance of archives

This chapter discusses the relevance of archives for collective memory. Through a presentation of the architecture of the Aqua Granda archive, the authors introduce a new type of collective memory and how it can integrate digital sources and direct contributions from citizens

Playing the wrong game: An experimental analysis of relational complexity and strategic misrepresentation

It has been suggested that players often produce simplified and/or misspecified mental representations of interactive decision problems (Kreps, 1990). We submit that the relational structure of players’ preferences in a game induces cognitive complexity, and may be an important driver of such simplifications. We provide a formal classification of order structures in two-person normal form games based on the two properties of monotonicity and projectivity, and present experiments in which subjects must first construct a representation of games of different relational complexity, and subsequently play the games according to their own representation. Experimental results support the hypothesis that relational complexity matters. More complex games are harder to represent, and this difficulty is correlated with measures of short term memory capacity. Furthermore, most erroneous representations are less complex than the correct ones. In addition, subjects who misrepresent the games behave consistently with such representations according to simple but rational decision criteria. This suggests that in many strategic settings individuals may act optimally on the ground of simplified and mistaken premises.pure motive, mixed motive, preferences, bi-orders, language, cognition, projectivity, monotonicity, short term memory, experiments

Talking about routines in the field: the emergence of organizational capabilities in a new cellular phone network company

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