Week 5: Game Design

Hello everyone!

Welcome back to my blog! Today, I will be talking through the progress I have made throughout the past week.

Experimental Design:

I have finished two rough drafts of my experiment, and considering the details about which version of the experiment I would run.

In the first version, it is both players may take the initiative to modify the payoff matrices, allowing for a symmetric set of instructions. And while this method may be more practical in real life, it has many limitations in an experimental setting, prompting me to prefer to use the second set.

In the second version, only player 1 can take the initiative to modify the payoff matrices. While the experiment would have asymmetric instructions, it would be much easier to implement, allowing the experimenter (me) to get all of the necessary information from a subject in just one poll.

In the coming weeks, I will still review my instructions: thinking about the budgeting and neutralizing any words that may cause participants to choose one action over another.

I will also draft instructions for a control experiment, where I run the same game, except without the framework, to see the difference in cooperation between the two experiments.

Report:

I have also started to write a comprehensive report about my project. I have written up all of the math behind the ideas in the framework, and I am thinking about adding more examples of games, beyond just the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which will help illustrate the effects of the framework.

In writing the report, I have also thought through many new scenarios, seeing how the framework will be realistic and better than other trivial solutions (such as agreeing to a legally binding contract to both cooperate), and trying to come up with real world scenarios (that may be more complicated than the Prisoner’s Dilemma) to use my framework to solve.

Make sure to tune into my blog next week, where I will be sharing additional updates about my experimental progress.