Effects of Prior Investment and Personal Responsibility in a Simple Network Game

The present study has two purposes. First, we wish to test the descriptive power of the Nash equilibrium solution in a traffic network game with a new population of participants and a different experimental procedure. Second, we wish to determine whether the effects of prior investment and personal responsibility, that may lead people to commit to a failing project, may be generalized from individual to interactive decision tasks. For these two purposes, we implement a computer-controlled traffic network game in which the addition of a cost-free line segment to the network may, in equilibrium, increase the travel cost of all the network users. Current Research in Social Psychology (Vol. 13, No. 2) (Aoki, et al.)