Identifying types in contest experiments
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Identifying types in contest experiments Francesco Fallucchi1
· Andrea Mercatanti2 · Jan Niederreiter3
Accepted: 24 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract We apply the classifier-Lasso (Su et al. 2016) to detect the presence of latent types in two data sets of previous contest experiments, one that keeps the grouping of contestants fixed over the experiment and one that randomly regroups contestants after each round. Our results suggest that there exist three distinct types of players in both contest regimes. The majority of contestants in fixed groups behaves reciprocal to opponents’ previous choices. A higher share of reciprocators per group is associated to lower average overspending which hints at cooperative attempts. For experiments in which contestants are regrouped, we find a significantly lower share of ‘reciprocators’ and no significant association between the share of reciprocators and average efforts. Keywords Experimetrics · Behavioral types · Experiment · Contest · C-Lasso Mathematics Subject Classification C38 · C57 · C73
1 Introduction The characterization of heterogeneous behavior has a long tradition across economic disciplines. Various approaches have been used to group subjects’ behavior in parsimo-
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00182020-00738-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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Francesco Fallucchi [email protected] Andrea Mercatanti [email protected] Jan Niederreiter [email protected]
1
Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), 11 Porte des Sciences, 4366 Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
2
Bank of Italy, Via Nazionale, 91, 00184 Rome, Italy
3
IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Piazza S. Ponziano, 6, 55100 Lucca, Italy
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nious, yet tractable ways. One eminent example is the typology in public good settings proposed by Fischbacher et al. (2001) who use a variant of the strategy method (Selten 1965). If we look at competitive settings, however, little progress has been made in defining a meaningful typology. An early attempt comes from Potters et al. (1998) in the experimental analysis of the Tullock (1967) rent-seeking contest. The authors acknowledge that, from the remarks left by participants, it is possible to classify three types of players: the ‘gamesmen’, who seem to understand the strategic nature of the game; the ‘adapters’, who adapt to the outcomes of the previous rounds; and the ‘confused’, who randomize effort. More recently, Herrmann and Orzen (2008) find support for the existence of different types in a variant of the Tullock contest using the strategy method. Modeling heterogeneity in competitive situations such as contests is an important step to understand conflict resolution, as it facilitates further research on the different motives that drive the behavior of individuals and aids comprehension of group dynamics caused by different type compositions. In this paper we propo
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