We study prisoners' dilemmas played in continuous time with flow payoffs accumulated over 60 seconds. In most cases, the median rate of mutual cooperation is about 90 percent. Control sessions with repeated matchings over eight subperiods achieve less than half as much cooperation, and cooperation rates approach zero in one-shot sessions. In follow-up sessions with a variable number of subperiods, cooperation rates increase nearly linearly as the grid size decreases, and, with one-second subperiods, they approach continuous levels. Our data support a strand of theory that explains how capacity to respond rapidly stabilizes cooperation and destabilizes defection in the prisoner's dilemma. (JEL C72, C78, C91)
Prediction markets are increasingly being considered as methods for gathering, summarizing and aggregating diffuse information by governments and businesses alike. Critics worry that these markets are susceptible to price manipulation by agents who wish to distort decision making. We study the effect of manipulators on an experimental market. We find that manipulators are unable to distort price accuracy. Subjects without manipulation incentives compensate for the bias in offers from manipulators by setting a different threshold at which they are willing to accept trades.
Human subjects decide when to sink a fixed cost "C" to seize an irreversible investment opportunity whose value "V" is governed by Brownian motion. The optimal policy is to invest when "V" first crosses a threshold "V"* = (1 + "w"*)"C", where the wait option premium "w"* depends on drift, volatility, and expiration hazard parameters. Subjects in the Low "w"* treatment on average invest at values quite close to optimum. Subjects in the two Medium and the High "w"* treatments invested at values below optimum, but with the predicted ordering, and values approached the optimum by the last block of 20 periods. Copyright Copyright © 2009 The Review of Economic Studies Limited.
We study long-run learning in an experimental Cournot game with no explicit information about the payo function. Subjects see only the quantities and payo s of each oligopolist after every period. In line with theoretical predictions and previous experimental ndings, duopolies and triopolies both reach highly competitive levels, with price approaching marginal cost within 50 periods.Using the new ConG software, we extend the horizon to 1,200 periods, far beyond that previously investigated. Already after 100 periods we observe a qualitative change in behavior, and quantity choices start to drop. Without pausing at the Cournot-Nash level quantities continue to drop, eventually reaching almost fully collusive levels in duopolies and often reaching deep into collusive territory for triopolies. Fitted models of individual adjustment suggest that subjects switch from imitation of the most pro table rival to other behavior that, intentionally or otherwise, facilitates collusion via e ective punishment and forgiveness. Remarkably, subjects never learn the best-reply correspondence of the one-shot game. Our results suggest a new explanation for the emergence of cooperation.
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Human players in our laboratory experiment received flow payoffs over 120 seconds each period from a standard Hawk-Dove bimatrix game played in continuous time. Play converged closely to the symmetric mixed Nash equilibrium under a one-population matching protocol. When the same players were matched in a two-population protocol with the same bimatrix, they showed clear movement towards an asymmetric (and very inequitable) pure Nash equilibrium of the game. These findings support distinctive predictions of evolutionary game theory. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL-Code: C73, C92, D74.
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