Week 6: Experimental Setup

Hello everyone!

Welcome back to my blog! Today I will be talking through my experimental design, as well as the progress I have made towards executing the experiment.

Within my experimental design, I am planning to have a control group (just a standard prisoner’s dilemma), and an experimental group, which consists of the two parts I labeled within the previous blog post.

For the experiment, I am planning to hold it on Prolific. Prolific offers a way to reach a wide variety of participants and give payment to them.

However, as I was designing the instructions for the experimental group, I ran into a bit of a problem: depending on the first player’s decisions, the instructions for the second player would be different. The only remedy I would have for this would be to make the contracts multiple choice, although even that would require many logistical challenges (along with the potential of introducing many sources of bias into the experiment).

Throughout the next week, I will be addressing this problem, finalizing the experimental setup, and getting ready to budget and publish the experiment on Prolific. Make sure to tune in then for more updates about my project!