Behavioural And Experimental Economics Workshop Day – 3

This was the concluding day of the workshop. Firstly, we read an article (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/upshot/gauging-the-gender-gap-present-and-future.html ) about the Ultimatum game with reference to gender- “Research shows real differences in men’s and women’s economic behavior, but suggests more equitable times to come.” The article was written in 2014- let’s hope things have improved by now! We also discussed the replicability crisis in social sciences and playing games to understand the theory and experiment.

Next, we played the following games-  

Two rounds of the Beauty Game (In game theory, “guess 2/3 of the average” is a game where several people guess what 2/3 of the average of their guesses will be, and where the numbers are restricted to the real numbers between 0 and 100, inclusive. The winner is the one closest to the 2/3 average). The 2/3 of the average picks (in the first and second rounds respectively) were 21.04, 14.39. 

Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma (three rounds)- and you could see the percentage of cooperators going down with each consecutive round! 

Repeated Ultimatum game- (One player, the proposer, is endowed with a sum of money. The proposer is tasked with splitting it with another player, the responder. Once the proposer communicates his decision, the responder may accept it or reject it. If the responder accepts, the money is split per the proposal; if the responder rejects, both players receive nothing. Both players know in advance the consequences of the responder accepting or rejecting the offer)- and again in this case, you could see the average amount offered decrease with each consecutive round!

Letting the anchoring effect do its magic, we concluded the workshop earlier than planned- this, is what a real Behavioural Economics workshop feels like!