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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Nashbots: How Political Scientists Have Underestimated Human Rationality, And How To Fix It, Daniel Enemark, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Nashbots: How Political Scientists Have Underestimated Human Rationality, And How To Fix It, Daniel Enemark, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Faculty Scholarship
Political scientists use experiments to test the predictions of game-theoretic models. In a typical experiment, each subject makes choices that determine her own earnings and the earnings of other subjects, with payments corresponding to the utility payoffs of a theoretical game. But social preferences distort the correspondence between a subject’s cash earnings and her subjective utility, and since social preferences vary, anonymously matched subjects cannot know their opponents’ preferences between outcomes, turning many laboratory tasks into games of incomplete information. We reduce the distortion of social preferences by pitting subjects against algorithmic agents (“Nashbots”). Across 11 experimental tasks, subjects facing …