Week 10: Wrapping Up

Hello everyone!

Welcome back to my blog! Today, I will be going through the progress I have made this past week, as well as some of the interesting features of the data that I have gathered.

During this week, I let out the experiment on prolific. As of now, all of the data has been collected and I have sorted out and paid everyone their appropriate payoffs. I will go over some of the interesting pieces of data here.

First, the control group had a ginormous amount of cooperators (about half); this was very surprising, and may have pointed to an inappropriate rewards system. It seems as if the participants were more focused on simply completing the form as quickly as possible (given that it was so short), rather than trying to read the instructions and maximize the amount of money they got from completing it. In experimental game theory, this is what happens when the reward system is not dominant. Some proof of this was built into the design of it, where people would choose different choices even though they were in the same scenario.

While the control group’s result was unexpected, the experimental group had much more representative results. Many of the results mirrored what I had predicted in the theory:
– Almost everyone chose to make some sort of intervention, with the most common one being (4, 1), which was the one that I suggested in my theory was the most effective.
– The split of cooperating and defecting also resembled the mixed strategy nash equilibrium that I wrote up in my theory.

While the results of the experimental group may suggest that the theory is “right,” it does not provide definitive proof. Rather, it shows that the framework can be effective; even if the average person did not understand what was going on, the average of their decisions corresponds to the theoretical Nash, allowing it to improve Pareto Efficiency.

Thank you for tuning in this week, next week I will provide a general summary of how the senior project has gone as a whole, as well as some concluding thoughts about the statistical analysis and theory. I will be presenting the senior project on Saturday, so make sure to show up to see the final product or ask questions!