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Full-Text Articles in Other Economics
Coordination And Evolutionary Dynamics: When Are Evolutionary Models Reliable?, Daniel Graydon Stephenson
Coordination And Evolutionary Dynamics: When Are Evolutionary Models Reliable?, Daniel Graydon Stephenson
ESI Publications
This study reports a continuous-time experimental test of evolutionary models in coordinated attacker–defender games. It implements three experimental treatment conditions: one with strong coordination incentives, one with weak coordination incentives, and one with zero coordination incentives. Each treatment exhibits identical equilibrium predictions but distinct evolutionary predictions. Observed behavior was tightly clustered around equilibrium under both the zero coordination treatment and the weak coordination treatment but widely dispersed from equilibrium under the strong coordination treatment. This result was anticipated by explicitly dynamic models but not by conventional stability criteria. In contrast to the widely maintained assumption of sign-preservation, subjects frequently switched …
Partners Or Strangers? Cooperation, Monetary Trade, And The Choice Of Scale Of Interaction, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
Partners Or Strangers? Cooperation, Monetary Trade, And The Choice Of Scale Of Interaction, Maria Bigoni, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
ESI Working Papers
We show that monetary exchange facilitates the transition from small to large-scale economic interactions. In an experiment, subjects chose to play an “intertemporal cooperation game” either in partnerships or in groups of strangers where payoffs could be higher. Theoretically, a norm of mutual support is sufficient to maximize efficiency through large-scale cooperation. Empirically, absent a monetary system, participants were reluctant to interact on a large scale; and when they did, efficiency plummeted compared to partnerships because cooperation collapsed. This failure was reversed only when a stable monetary system endogenously emerged: the institution of money mitigated strategic uncertainty problems.
Clarity Trumps Content: An Experiment On Information Acquisition In Beauty Contests, Sanjay Banerjee, Hong Qu, Ran Zhao
Clarity Trumps Content: An Experiment On Information Acquisition In Beauty Contests, Sanjay Banerjee, Hong Qu, Ran Zhao
Accounting Faculty Articles and Research
We provide experimental evidence that under strong beauty contest incentives, players ignore signals from an information source with high content if the source has low clarity. Instead, they acquire equally costly signals from a source with higher clarity despite its lower content. Content measures how precisely an information source identifies an economic situation, whereas clarity measures how precisely the source content is commonly interpreted. Low clarity impairs players' ability to coordinate. When signals are provided exogenously, our experimental results are less severe than theoretical predictions, but consistent with level-2 reasoning in a cognitive behavioral model. When players acquire signals endogenously, …