Week 7: Finalizing Experimental Setup

Hello everyone!

Welcome back to my blog! Today, I will be going over the progress that I have made throughout the last week.

Last week, I talked about the format of how I am planning to run my experiment and the problems I ran into, today I will talk about the solutions I came up with for those problems, and how the statistical analysis of the data might look like after the experiment is conducted.

The main issue I ran into the previous week was budgeting and the logistics of creating various separate forms. To tackle these issues, I worked with my advisor to modify the format of the form: instead of having separate forms for each side to fill out, I have combined each of them into a single form, determining whether a subject is Player 1 or Player 2 randomly after the form is sent. This allows me to do a few things:
– It helps clarify the instructions of the form and allows players to think about how other players may view the situation
– It generates double the data for the experiment, helping ease the budgeting issues.

Now, to solve the other problem, I figured that by choosing payoffs that are small enough, I can simplify the options that each player has into a few different options, allowing me to fit everything on a singular, pre-set form.

After the data is collected, I will randomly assign players into pairs, randomly choosing which players to be Player 1 and which players to be Player 2. Then, after assigning and distributing the payoffs through Prolific, I will run t-test on the payoffs for Player 1, seeing whether they resemble the traditional Nash Equilibrium, or whether they resemble the payoff expected by my framework. Using this model, I can assess whether the model has had a practical effect on how the players managed the situation, and also whether it significantly improved upon the traditional, logical, line of reasoning. I will also see if demographic data had an effect, gathering data based on demographic information such as age, gender, or ethnicity.

Next week, I (hopefully) will have officially started the experiment on Prolific; under my current estimations, it will cost around $100-125 to conduct the experiment for 100 people. Tune in then for another update about my project!