In this paper, we introduce a psychological-game-inspired construct, termed an experimental game. This framework is intended for use in experimental analysis and departs from standard psychological games by being fully deterministic. The proposed model may be regarded as a Boolean analogue of a psychological game.
This paper uses a sample of over 4000 adolescents to show the relation between delay of gratification and creative task performance. We use the Alternative Uses Task (AUT), in which participants generate alternative uses for a common object (a brick). Delay of gratification is measured through six hypothetical monetary decisions between receiving a reward tomorrow or in a week. Creative performance is measured along three dimensions: fluency, the number of valid uses listed; lexical diversity, the breadth of distinct vocabulary used across a participant’s responses; and frequency-based originality, the share of a participant’s valid uses classified as rare across the sample. Results show that individuals who delay gratification perform better on the task by listing more uses, using a more diverse vocabulary, and generating a higher share of original uses. This suggests that the ability to delay gratification is associated with more sustained engagement in the task, reflected not only in the quantity of ideas produced, but also in the variety of words used and in how infrequent those ideas are.
The Beauty Contest Game (BCG) has been widely used to study strategic reasoning, with previous research focusing primarily on cognitive determinants of behavior. This paper examines whether emotional factors are also associated with heterogeneity in strategic decision-making by distinguishing between relatively stable emotional competencies (emotional intelligence) and temporary affective states (mood). We conduct a laboratory experiment in which participants play a one-shot BCG and complete measures of emotional intelligence based on Goleman’s four-domain framework and current mood using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). We analyze both guessing decisions and level-k reasoning to distinguish between observed choices and levels of strategic reasoning. The results show that social awareness is associated with lower guesses and higher levels of reasoning, whereas positive mood is associated with higher guesses and negative mood with lower reasoning levels. Overall, the findings extend the BCG literature beyond cognitive characteristics by showing that different emotional factors are associated with distinct dimensions of strategic behavior.
Risk and uncertainty preferences are key determinants of agricultural production decisions. Yet preferences elicited through standard lottery tasks often exhibit weak external validity. While task contextualization is meant to bridge this gap, its application to risk and especially uncertainty preference elicitation remains underexplored in developing countries. This paper fills two gaps in the literature. First, we provide a novel application application of contextualized experiments to elicit uncertainty preferences among smallholders in a developing economy. Second, we conduct a comparative evaluation of the external validity of risk versus uncertainty preferences across contextualized and non-contextualized formats. We use a lab-in-the-field experiment paired with a survey of farmers in Zimbabwe. Participants completed both non-contextualized and contextualized lottery tasks, with the latter framed around contract farming decisions across various crops to manipulate salience. Our results reveal that contextualized preferences differ from non-contextualized counterparts, with standard tasks overestimating risk and uncertainty aversion. Regarding external validity, elicited risk preferences fail to correlate with real-world decisions. Conversely, uncertainty preferences exhibit selective external validity, correlating with farming choices only when elicited with a salient framing. These findings highlight that while contextualization can enhance external validity, its efficacy is highly context-dependent, necessitating careful methodological refinement before integration into economic modelling.
We investigate whether the shift towards seemingly myopic behaviour in a sequential game, observed when the number of periods and participants increases, arises from limitations in backward reasoning or from strategic uncertainty. Building on our previous laboratory implementation of the Core-Periphery model in Economic Geography with four sequential players, we introduce a new treatment in which only the first decision is made by a human, while subsequent decisions are taken by expected payoff maximising artificial agents. As strategic uncertainty is removed in the new treatment, 71% of first movers choose the forward-looking migration decision, compared to 45% in the corresponding treatment with four human decision makers. The difficulty of applying backward induction for first movers is kept constant across the two treatments compared. Together with control for inequity aversion, the experimental design allows for isolating the increased strategic uncertainty faced by the first movers as the main driver behind the treatment effect. Moreover, the positive effect of economics training on sequentially rational play largely disappears once strategic uncertainty is eliminated. These results highlight the behavioural importance of strategic uncertainty in dynamic coordination environments.
