Chemical beauty contest

A Corporate Beauty Contest

We conduct beauty contest experiments, using close to 2,000 subjects to study the facial traits of CEOs. In one experiment we use pairs of photographs and find that subjects rate CEO faces as appearing more “competent” and less “likable” than non-CEO faces. Another experiment matches CEOs from large firms against CEOs from smaller firms and finds large-firm CEOs look more competent and likable....

The two-person beauty contest

We introduce a two-person beauty contest game with a unique Nash equilibrium that is identical to the game with many players. However, iterative reasoning is unnecessary in the two-person game as choosing zero is a weakly dominant strategy. Despite this “easier” solution concept, we find that a large majority of players do not choose zero. This is the case even with a sophisticated subject pool...

An Interferometry Imaging Beauty Contest

We present a formal comparison of the performance of algorithms used for synthesis imaging with optical/infrared long-baseline interferometers. Five different algorithms are evaluated based on their performance with simulated test data. Each set of test data is formatted in the OI-FITS format. The data are calibrated power spectra and bispectra measured with an array intended to be typical of e...

Estimation of Beauty Contest Auctions

A Beauty Contest with Flexible Information Acquisition

This paper studies a beauty-contest coordination game. A continuum of players get payoffs based on the squared distance of their action from an unobserved fundamental state of the world and the average action among all players. Each player receives a signal whose probability distribution conditional on the value of the fundamental is part of their strategy. This flexible information acquisition...