I am trying to understand the different motivations of Game Theorists, Experimental Economists, Agent Based Computational Economists, and other agent based modellers (e.g. Social Scientist, Psychologists) for using the "Public Goods" games during their investigations.
I have two categories of questions for the different groups:
(1) What are you trying to learn from it? What kind of question are you trying to answer? Are your answers case-based or generic?
(2) How do you collect evidence for accepting or rejecting your hypotheses? Which metrics do you use? Do you normally focus on providing average outputs (result) or are you also interested in collecting information about the evolution of the system over time (time plots)?
In your response please do not forget to state which group you belong to ;-).
Many thanks for your help!
As a psychologist and behavioural economist (if I can call myself the latter), I seek to understand why some people keep contributing to the public good, in the presence of obvious defectors. Explanations like altruism and reciprocity have been studied extensively, but i recently came across an evolutionary explanation for the behaviour - cost signalling theory. It states that individuals who have more evolutionary advantages would want to signal those advantages to potential mates (or potential competitors) by engaging in behaviour that is costly to them. Giving in a PGG is costly, but that only indicates that the giver has more resources at his/her disposal, and therefore, can afford to give. This is the reference:
Millet., K., & Dewitte, S. (2007). Altruistic behavior as a costly signal of general intelligence. Journal of Research in Personality, 41(2), 316–326.
Also, the personality features of the defectors/free riders interests me.
Secondly, i have not used time plots, and rely only on the results of each round of a PGG and each PGG. Hope this helps :)
The specifics of an experiment depend on what you want to observe. If you want to look at intuitive reactions, you would be best looking at quick decisions and compare them with slow ones [1]. If you are interested in seeing how a group evolves, then you want to experiment an iterated public goods. And so on.
As for the general motivations why people keep experimenting the public goods game as well as other social dilemmas, the reason is that social dilemmas formalise many fundamental situation of our society, from depletion of natural resources to climate protection, from security of energy supply to price competition markets, workplace collaborations, political participation, and international relations. Consequently, understanding how and why cooperation can evolve in a social dilemma is a topic of primary importance.
The standard model (Nash equilibrium) predicts that humans contribute nothing to the public good. However, fortunately, this is not what happens. A large body of experimental studies has by now confirmed that humans do contribute something and the amount of contribution typically depends on the parameters of the game (marginal return and size of the group). These data are so regular and robust that people are getting more and more convinced that cooperation does have also a strategic component that can be captured by suitable models [2],[3].
References:
[1] Rand DG, Green JD, Nowak MA (2012) Spontaneous giving and calculated greed. Nature 489, 427-430.
[2] Charness G, Rabin M (2002) Understanding social preferences with simple tests. The Quaterly Journal of Economics 117 (3), 817-869.
[3] Capraro V (2013) A Model of Human Cooperation in Social Dilemmas. PLoS ONE 8(8): e72427.
Peer-Olaf,
regarding the evolution or emergence of different public goods environment, please feel free to have a look at our working paper "Emergence of Sanctions Under Uncertainty". I am also working on something related with Simon Gächter, a colleague of yours at the University of Nottingham, who I wil visit in March.
Best,
Kristoffel
Perhaps the "evolution [emergence] of cooperation" is the central point of such investigation. Cooperation than leads to equilibria in public goods provision. While equilibria conditions informs policy, the unfolding of the the emergent property (in this case, "cooperation") enriches theoretical understanding underlying observed behavior. Simulation provides a bridge between a priori and a posteriori theorizing.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1310/1310.5520.pdf
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