A Public Dilemma: Cooperation with Large Stakes and a Large Audience

We analyze a large-stakes prisoner's dilemma game played on a TV show. Players cooperate 40% of the time, demonstrating that social preferences are important; however, cooperation is significantly below the 50% threshold that is required for inequity aversion to sustain cooperation. Women cooperate significantly more than men, while players who have "earned" more of the stake cooperate less. A player's promise to cooperate is also a good predictor of his decision. Surprisingly, a player's probability of cooperation is unrelated to the opponent's characteristics or promise. We argue that inequity aversion alone cannot adequately explain these results; reputational concerns in a public setting might be more important.

Beauty and the Sources of Discrimination

We analyze discrimination against less attractive people on a TV game show with high stakes. The game has a rich structure that allows us to disentangle the relationship between attractiveness and the determinants of a player’s earnings. Unattractive players perform no worse than attractive ones, and are equally cooperative in the prisoner’s dilemma stage of the game. Nevertheless, they are substantially more likely to be eliminated by their peers, even though this is costly. We investigate third party perceptions of discrimination by asking subjects to predict elimination decisions. Subjects implicitly assign a role for attractiveness but underestimate its magnitude

Is Beauty only Skin-deep? Disentangling the Beauty Premium on a Game Show

This paper analyzes behavior on a TV game show where players’ monetary payoffs depend upon an array of factors, including ability in answering questions, perceived cooperativeness and the willingness of other players to choose them. We find a substantial beauty premium and are able to disentangle contributing factors. Attractive players perform no differently than less attractive ones, on every dimension. They also exhibit and engender the same degree of cooperativeness. Nevertheless, attractive players are substantially less likely to be eliminated by their peers. Our results suggest a consumption value basis for the beauty premium

A Public Dilemma: Cooperation with Large Stakes and a Large Audience

We analyze a large-stakes prisoner's dilemma game played on a TV show. Players cooperate 40% of the time, demonstrating that social preferences are important; however, cooperation is significantly below the 50% threshold that is required for inequity aversion to sustain cooperation. Women cooperate significantly more than men, while players who have "earned" more of the stake cooperate less. A player's promise to cooperate is also a good predictor of his decision. Surprisingly, a player's probability of cooperation is unrelated to the opponent's characteristics or promise. We argue that inequity aversion alone cannot adequately explain these results; reputational concerns in a public setting might be more important

Per-site occupancy in the discrete parking problem

We consider the classical discrete parking problem, in which cars arrive uniformly at random on any two adjacent sites out of n sites on a line. An arriving car parks if there is no overlap with previously parked cars, and leaves otherwise. This process continues until there is no more space available for cars to park, at which point we may compute the jamming density En/n, which represents the expected fraction of occupied sites. We extend the classical results by not just considering the total expected number of cars parked, but also the probability of each site being occupied by a car. This we then use to provide an alternative derivation of the jamming density

Instability of MaxWeight scheduling algorithms

MaxWeight scheduling algorithms provide an effective mechanism for achieving queue stability and guaranteeing maximum throughput in a wide variety of scenarios. The maximum-stability guarantees however rely on the fundamental premise that the system consists of a fixed set of sessions with stationary ergodic traffic processes. In the present paper we examine a scenario where the population of active sessions varies over time, as sessions eventually end while new sessions occasionally start. We identify a simple necessary and sufficient condition for stability, and show that MaxWeight policies may fail to provide maximum stability. The intuitive explanation is that these policies tend to give preferential treatment to flows with large backlogs, so that the rate variations of flows with smaller backlogs are not fully exploited. In the usual framework with a fixed collection of flows, the latter phenomenon cannot persist since the flows with smaller backlogs will build larger queues and gradually start receiving more service. With a dynamic population of flows, however, MaxWeight policies may constantly get diverted to arriving flows, while neglecting the rate variations of a persistently growing number of flows in progress with relatively small remaining backlogs. We also perform extensive simulation experiments to corroborate the analytical findings