Confusion and Reinforcement Learning in Experimental Public Goods Games ∗
نویسنده
چکیده
We use a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion in an experimental, repeated public goods game. The results show that reinforcement learning leads to dynamics similar to those observed in standard public goods games. However, closer inspection shows that individual decay of contributions in standard public goods games cannot be fully explained by reinforcement learning. According to our estimates, learning only accounts for 41 percent of the decay in contributions in standard public goods games. The contribution dynamics of subjects, who are identified as conditional cooperators, differ strongly from the learning dynamics, while a learning model estimated from the limited information treatment tracks behavior for subjects, who cannot be classified as conditional cooperators, reasonably well.
منابع مشابه
University of Innsbruck Working Papers in Economics and Statistics Confusion and Reinforcement Learning in Experimental Public Goods Games
We use a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion in an experimental, repeated public goods game. The results show that reinforcement learning leads to dynamics similar to those observed in standard public goods games. However, closer inspection shows that individual decay of contributions in standard public goods games cannot be fully explained by reinforcement learning....
متن کاملConfusion and Learning in the Public Goods Game
We test if confusion and learning could potentially explain all the decay of contributions in the repeated public goods games by implementing a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion. A comparison shows that the rate of decline is more than twice as high in a standard public goods game. Furthermore, we find that simple learning cannot generate the contribution dynamics,...
متن کاملReinforcement learning accounts for moody conditional cooperation behavior: experimental results
In social dilemma games, human participants often show conditional cooperation (CC) behavior or its variant called moody conditional cooperation (MCC), with which they basically tend to cooperate when many other peers have previously cooperated. Recent computational studies showed that CC and MCC behavioral patterns could be explained by reinforcement learning. In the present study, we use a re...
متن کاملRevisiting Kindness and Confusion in Public Goods Experiments: Comment∗
We present a novel experiment to evaluate the role of confusion in explaining the dynamics of contributions in public goods experiments. In a learning condition we keep the subjects confused by withholding the information that would be necessary for them to understand the game. The comparison of the results with those of a standard public goods treatment provides a lower bound for the influence...
متن کاملRalph - C Bayer , Elke Renner and Rupert Sausgruber November 2012 Confusion and Learning in the Voluntary Contributions Game CeDEx
We use a limited information environment to assess the role of confusion in the repeated voluntary contributions game. A comparison with play in a standard version of the game suggests, that the common claim that decision errors due to confused subjects biases estimates of cooperation upwards, is not necessarily correct. Furthermore, we find that simple learning cannot generate the kind of cont...
متن کامل