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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Doors Of Perception: Theory And Evidence Of Frame-Dependent Rationalizability, Gary Charness, Alessandro Sontuoso
The Doors Of Perception: Theory And Evidence Of Frame-Dependent Rationalizability, Gary Charness, Alessandro Sontuoso
ESI Working Papers
We investigate how strategic behavior is affected by the set of notions (frames) used when thinking about the game. In our games, the action set consists of visual objects: each player must privately choose one, trying to match the counterpart’s choice. We propose a model where different player-types are aware of different attributes of the action set (hence, different frames). One of the novelties is an epistemic structure that allows players to think about new frames, after initial unawareness of some attributes. To test the model, our experimental design brings about multiple frames by varying subjects’ awareness of several attributes.
A Notion Of Prominence For Games With Natural-Language Labels, Alessandro Sontuoso, Sudeep Bhatia
A Notion Of Prominence For Games With Natural-Language Labels, Alessandro Sontuoso, Sudeep Bhatia
ESI Working Papers
We study games with natural-language labels (i.e., strategic problems where options are denoted by words), for which we propose and test a measurable characterization of prominence. We assume that – ceteris paribus – players find particularly prominent those strategies that are denoted by words more frequently used in their everyday language. To operationalize this assumption, we suggest that the prominence of a strategy-label is correlated with its frequency of occurrence in large text corpora, such as the Google Books corpus (“n-gram” frequency). In testing for the strategic use of word frequency, we consider experimental games with different incentive structures (such …
Endogenous Market Formation And Monetary Trade: An Experiment, Gabriele Camera, Dror Goldberg, Avi Weiss
Endogenous Market Formation And Monetary Trade: An Experiment, Gabriele Camera, Dror Goldberg, Avi Weiss
ESI Working Papers
The theory of money assumes decentralized bilateral exchange and excludes centralized multilateral exchange. However, endogenizing the exchange process is critical for understanding the conditions that support the use of money. We develop a “travelling game” to study the emergence of decentralized and centralized exchange, theoretically and experimentally. Players located on separate islands can either trade locally, or pay a cost to trade elsewhere, so decentralized and centralized markets can both emerge in equilibrium. The former minimize trade costs through monetary exchange; the latter maximizes overall surplus through non-monetary exchange. Monetary trade emerges when coordination is problematic, while centralized trade emerges …
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.
Monitoring Institutions In Indefinitely Repeated Games, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
Monitoring Institutions In Indefinitely Repeated Games, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari
ESI Working Papers
Does monitoring past conduct facilitate intertemporal cooperation? We designed an experiment characterized by strategic uncertainty and multiple equilibria where coordinating on the efficient outcome is a challenge. Participants, interacting anonymously in a group, could pay a cost either to obtain information about their counterparts, or to create a freely available public record of individual conduct. Both monitoring institutions were actively employed. However, groups were unable to attain higher levels of cooperation compared to a treatment without monitoring. Information about past conduct alone thus appears to be ineffective in overcoming coordination challenges.
Endogenous Market Formation And Monetary Trade: An Experiment, Gabriele Camera, Dror Goldberg, Avi Weiss
Endogenous Market Formation And Monetary Trade: An Experiment, Gabriele Camera, Dror Goldberg, Avi Weiss
ESI Working Papers
The theory of money assumes decentralized bilateral exchange and excludes centralized multilateral exchange. However, endogenizing the exchange process is critical for understanding the conditions that support the use of money. We develop a “travelling game” to study the spontaneous emergence of decentralized and centralized exchange, theoretically and experimentally. Players located on separate “islands” can either trade locally, or pay a cost to trade elsewhere, so decentralized and centralized markets can both emerge in equilibrium. The latter maximize trade meetings and are socially efficient; the former minimize trade costs through the use of money. In the laboratory, centralized exchange more frequently …
An Experiment On Retail Payments Systems, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari, Stefania Bortolotti
An Experiment On Retail Payments Systems, Gabriele Camera, Marco Casari, Stefania Bortolotti
ESI Working Papers
We develop a novel theoretical and experimental framework to study adoption and use of cash versus electronic payments in retail transactions. The design allows us to assess the behavioral impact of sellers’ service fees and buyers’ rewards from using electronic payments. In the experiment, buyers and sellers faced a coordination problem, independently choosing a payment method before trading. Sellers readily adopted electronic payments but buyers did not. Eliminating service fees or introducing rewards significantly increased adoption and use of electronic payments. Buyers’ economic incentives played a pivotal role in the diffusion of electronic payments but cannot fully explain their adoption …
Asymmetric And Endogenous Within-Group Communication In Competitive Coordination Games, Timothy N. Cason, Roman Sheremeta, Jingjing Zhang
Asymmetric And Endogenous Within-Group Communication In Competitive Coordination Games, Timothy N. Cason, Roman Sheremeta, Jingjing Zhang
ESI Working Papers
Within-group communication in competitive coordination games has been shown to increase competition between groups and lower efficiency. This study further explores potentially harmful effects of communication, by addressing the questions of (i) asymmetric communication and (ii) the endogenous emergence of communication. Our theoretical analysis provides testable hypotheses regarding the effect of communication on competitive behavior and efficiency. We test these predictions using a laboratory experiment. The experiment shows that although asymmetric communication is not as harmful as symmetric communication, it leads to more aggressive competition and lower efficiency relative to the case when neither group can communicate. Moreover, groups vote …