NSF Funded Research

The US government has graciously decided to fund an experimental economics study I proposed. The study investigates two important findings in game theory. The first is unsurprising, but poses a problem for extending experimental findings to the real world. It is the discovery that intentional contexts- like interpersonal feedback, or knowledge of voluntary agency - influence the way people behave in economic games. This means that the ostensible payoffs and formal game structure may often underdetermine the actual behavior we witness in various games because these other variables are systematically at play. This would make it very difficult to draw useful analogies between laboratory games and real world scenarios. A second important finding reported in recent research is that certain preferences change when elicited by different institutions. This is interesting in itself, as a puzzle for the many social scientists who are interested in preference formation. But it also means that simply measuring someone's preferences for something like, say, "risk," in a laboratory game many not tell you anything about their preference for risk when it comes to certain real world scenarios.

 

I developed an experimental protocol that investigates both of these findings in an attempt to better understand and refine the contextual specification of laboratory games.

 

The concepts and details explained in my IRB protocol, which can be found here . (This document may not be available until after the data has been collected.)

 

Implementation

I will be using the DIISP Lab at Duke's Social Science Research Institute.