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Playing the Wrong Game: An Experimental Analysis of Relational Complexity and Strategic Misrepresentation
No full textCOLLANA WORKING PAPER DEL LABORATORIO DI ECONOMIA SPERIMENTALE DELL'UNIVERSITA' DI TRENT
You Better Play 7 : Mutual versus Common Knowledge of Advice in a Weak-link Experiment
No full textThis 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. In the mutual knowledge of level 1 treatment, the suggestion appears on every subject's monitor at the beginning of every round, with no common knowledge that everybody sees the same suggestion. In the mutual knowledge of level 2 treatment, the same suggestion appears on each subject's monitor, accompanied by the request to "send" the suggestion to the partner in the round, followed by a notification that the message has been read. Finally, in the common knowledge treatment, the suggestion is read aloud by the experimenter at the end of the learning phase. 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 (as the one occurring in our "message" treatment) induces successful coordination more frequently than common knowledge
Adaptive learning and emergent coordination in minority games
Full text linkThe work studies the properties of a coordination game in which agents repeatedly compete to be in the population minority. The game re ects some essential features of those economic situations in which positive rewards are assigned to individuals who behave in opposition to the modal behavior in a population. Here we model a group of heterogeneous agents who adaptively learn and we investigate the transient and long-run aggregate properties of the system in terms of both allocative and informational efficiency. Our results show that, first, the system long-run properties strongly depend on the behavioral learning rules adopted, and, second, adding noise at the individual decision level and hence increasing heterogeneity in the population substantially improve aggregate welfare, although at the expense of a longer adjustment phase. In fact, the system achieves in that way a higher level of efficiency compared to that attainable by perfectly rational and completely informed agents
A Laboratory Experiment on the Minority Game
No full textThis work presents experimental results on a coordination game in which agents must repeatedly choose between two sides, and a positive fixed payoff is assigned only to agents who pick the minoritarian side. We conduct laboratory experiments in which stationary groups of five players play the game for 100 periods, and manipulate two treatment variables: the amount of ‘memory’ M that players have regarding the game history (i.e., the length of the string of past outcomes that players can see on the screen while choosing) and the amount of information about other players’ past choices. Our results show that, at the aggregate level, a quite remarkable degree of coordination is achieved. Moreover, providing players with full information about other players’ choice distribution does not appear to improve efficiency significantly
Playing the Wrong Game: An Experimental Analysis of Relational Complexity and Strategic Misrepresentation
Full text linkIt has been suggested that players often produce simplified and/or misspecified mental models of strategic decisions [Kreps, D., 1990. Game Theory and Economic Modeling. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford]. We submit that the relational structure of players’ preferences in a game is a source of cognitive complexity, and may be an important driver of such simplifications. We provide a classification of order structures in two- person games based on the properties of monotonicity and projectivity, and present experiments in which subjects construct representations of games of different relational complexity and subsequently play the games according to these representations. Experimental results suggest that relational complexity matters. More complex games are harder to represent, and this difficulty seems correlated with short term memory capacity. In addition, most erroneous representations are simpler than the correct ones. Finally, subjects who misrepresent the games behave consistently with such representations, suggesting that in many strategic settings individuals may act optimally on the ground of simplified and mistaken premises
Adaptive Coordination and Aggregate Efficiency in Minority Games
No full textR. Cowan and N. Jonard (eds.
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