This is especially important for this game: if there is only one or two universes, many players will never even consider the idea of undertaking the unpleasant task, knowing that it would increase the other players' scores more than theirs.

Thus, a player with the best ranking in an extremely competitive experiment might end up with a bad overall ranking, and players have an incentive to also pay attention to their 'absolute' score. One way to alleviate this problem is to have several separate universes. In this kind of games, players pay usually more attention to their ranking than to their 'absolute' pay-off, which distorts incentives (this is the reason why scientific experimental economics insists on giving actual money to the players). Having not enough universes can create an incentive problem here. It's interesting to choose many small universes for one experiment and a few big universes for the other: If players behave according to the symetric mixed-strategy nash equilibrium of the game, the more players in the universe, the smaller the likelihood that the project will succeed. Your goal is to maximize your payoff, not just to be better than the players you are faced with. Your overall payoffs are compared to those of everyone else in the class. The same players will remain in the same universes until the end.

In fact, you will play two of these games at the same time, with random players from your class.

If at least one person undertakes the task, the project is a success: those who have undertaken the task have a payoff equivalent to € 7000, the others a payoff equivalent to € 20000. So if no one undertakes the task, the project is a failure and each team member has a payoff equivalent to € 0. The unpleasant task is valued as being equivalent to a cost of € 13000 by the person who undertakes it. You must all decide simultaneously whether or not you undertake this task, without communicating.Ĭorresponding gains are determined as follows: The project's success is 'valued' by each of you as € 20000. For the project to succeed, someone must undertake a particularly unpleasant task, for which nobody was specifically named as responsible. You are part of a team working on a project.

Game of chicken real life examples