Handbook Of Experimental Game Theory

The aim of this Handbook is twofold: to educate and to inspire. It is meant for researchers and graduate students who are interested in taking a data-based and behavioral approach to the study of game theory. Educators and students of economics will find the Handbook useful as a companion book to conventional upper-level game theory textbooks, enabling them to compare and contrast actual behavior with theoretical predictions. Researchers and non-specialists will find valuable examples of laboratory and field experiments that test game theoretic propositions and suggest new ways of modeling strategic behavior. Chapters are organized into several sections; each section concludes with an inspirational chapter, offering suggestions on new directions and cutting-edge topics of research in experimental game theory.

This is the second of three volumes surveying the state of the art in Game Theory and its applications to many and varied fields, in particular to economics. The chapters in the present volume are contributed by outstanding authorities, and provide comprehensive coverage and precise statements of the main results in each area. The applications include empirical evidence. The following topics are covered: communication and correlated equilibria, coalitional games and coalition structures, utility and subjective probability, common knowledge, bargaining, zero-sum games, differential games, and applications of game theory to signalling, moral hazard, search, evolutionary biology, international relations, voting procedures, social choice, public economics, politics, and cost allocation. This handbook will be of interest to scholars in economics, political science, psychology, mathematics and biology. For more information on the Handbooks in Economics series, please see our home page on http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/hes

Experimental methods in economics respond to circumstances that are not completely dictated by accepted theory or outstanding problems. While the field of economics makes sharp distinctions and produces precise theory, the work of experimental economics sometimes appear blurred and may produce results that vary from strong support to little or partial support of the relevant theory. At a recent conference, a question was asked about where experimental methods might be more useful than field methods. Although many cannot be answered by experimental methods, there are questions that can only be answered by experiments. Much of the progress of experimental methods involves the posing of old or new questions in a way that experimental methods can be applied. The title of the book reflects the spirit of adventure that experimentalists share and focuses on experiments in general rather than forcing an organization into traditional categories that do not fit. The emphasis reflects the fact that the results do not necessarily demonstrate a consistent theme, but instead reflect bits and pieces of progress as opportunities to pose questions become recognized. This book is a result of an invitation sent from the editors to a broad range of experimenters asking them to write brief notes describing specific experimental results. The challenge was to produce pictures and tables that were self-contained so the reader could understand quickly the essential nature of the experiments and the results.

An introduction to game theory that offers not only theoretical tools but also the intuition and behavioral insights to apply these tools to real-world situations. This introductory text on game theory provides students with both the theoretical tools to analyze situations through the logic of game theory and the intuition and behavioral insights to apply these tools to real-world situations. It is unique among game theory texts in offering a clear, formal introduction to standard game theory while incorporating evidence from experimental data and introducing recent behavioral models. Students will not only learn about incentives, how to represent situations as games, and what agents “should” do in these situations, but they will also be presented with evidence that either confirms the theoretical assumptions or suggests a way in which the theory might be updated. Features: Each chapter begins with a motivating example that can be run as an experiment and ends with a discussion of the behavior in the example. Parts I–IV cover the fundamental “nuts and bolts” of any introductory game theory course, including the theory of games, simple games with simultaneous decision making by players, sequential move games, and incomplete information in simultaneous and sequential move games. Parts V–VII apply the tools developed in previous sections to bargaining, cooperative game theory, market design, social dilemmas, and social choice and voting. Part VIII offers a more in-depth discussion of behavioral game theory models including evolutionary and psychological game theory. Supplemental material on the book’s website include solutions to end-of-chapter exercises, a manual for running each chapter’s experimental games using pencil and paper, and the oTree codes for running the games online.

Game theory, the formalized study of strategy, began in the 1940s by asking how emotionless geniuses should play games, but ignored until recently how average people with emotions and limited foresight actually play games. This book marks the first substantial and authoritative effort to close this gap. Colin Camerer, one of the field's leading figures, uses psychological principles and hundreds of experiments to develop mathematical theories of reciprocity, limited strategizing, and learning, which help predict what real people and companies do in strategic situations. Unifying a wealth of information from ongoing studies in strategic behavior, he takes the experimental science of behavioral economics a major step forward. He does so in lucid, friendly prose. Behavioral game theory has three ingredients that come clearly into focus in this book: mathematical theories of how moral obligation and vengeance affect the way people bargain and trust each other; a theory of how limits in the brain constrain the number of steps of "I think he thinks . . ." reasoning people naturally do; and a theory of how people learn from experience to make better strategic decisions. Strategic interactions that can be explained by behavioral game theory include bargaining, games of bluffing as in sports and poker, strikes, how conventions help coordinate a joint activity, price competition and patent races, and building up reputations for trustworthiness or ruthlessness in business or life. While there are many books on standard game theory that address the way ideally rational actors operate, Behavioral Game Theory stands alone in blending experimental evidence and psychology in a mathematical theory of normal strategic behavior. It is must reading for anyone who seeks a more complete understanding of strategic thinking, from professional economists to scholars and students of economics, management studies, psychology, political science, anthropology, and biology.

This book, which comprises eight chapters, presents a comprehensive critical survey of the results and methods of laboratory experiments in economics. The first chapter provides an introduction to experimental economics as a whole, with the remaining chapters providing surveys by leading practitioners in areas of economics that have seen a concentration of experiments: public goods, coordination problems, bargaining, industrial organization, asset markets, auctions, and individual decision making. The work aims both to help specialists set an agenda for future research and to provide nonspecialists with a critical review of work completed to date. Its focus is on elucidating the role of experimental studies as a progressive research tool so that wherever possible, emphasis is on series of experiments that build on one another. The contributors to the volume--Colin Camerer, Charles A. Holt, John H. Kagel, John O. Ledyard, Jack Ochs, Alvin E. Roth, and Shyam Sunder--adopt a particular methodological point of view: the way to learn how to design and conduct experiments is to consider how good experiments grow organically out of the issues and hypotheses they are designed to investigate.

The first volume of this wide-ranging Handbook contains original contributions by world-class specialists. It provides up-to-date surveys of the main game-theoretic tools commonly used to model industrial organization topics. The Handbook covers numerous subjects in detail including, among others, the tools of lattice programming, supermodular and aggregative games, monopolistic competition, horizontal and vertically differentiated good models, dynamic and Stackelberg games, entry games, evolutionary games with adaptive players, asymmetric information, moral hazard, learning and information sharing models.

The ability to understand and predict behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual’s success in making choices depends on the choices of others, has been the domain of game theory since the 1950s. Developing the theories at the heart of game theory has resulted in 8 Nobel Prizes and insights that researchers in many fields continue to develop. In Volume 4, top scholars synthesize and analyze mainstream scholarship on games and economic behavior, providing an updated account of developments in game theory since the 2002 publication of Volume 3, which only covers work through the mid 1990s. Focuses on innovation in games and economic behavior Presents coherent summaries of subjects in game theory Makes details about game theory accessible to scholars in fields outside economics