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How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…
This paper reports experimental data describing the dynamics of three key information-sharing outcomes: quantity of information shared, falsification and accuracy. The experimental design follows a formal model predicting that cooperative…
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
We consider schemes for obtaining truthful reports on a common but hidden signal from large groups of rational, self-interested agents. One example are online feedback mechanisms, where users provide observations about the quality of a…
User-generated content can be distributed at a low cost using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, but the free-rider problem hinders the utilization of P2P networks. In order to achieve an efficient use of P2P networks, we investigate fundamental…
In many settings, an effective way of evaluating objects of interest is to collect evaluations from dispersed individuals and to aggregate these evaluations together. Some examples are categorizing online content and evaluating student…
Science prizes purportedly reward innovation and explorations of new phenomena. Yet, in practice prizes may inadvertently divert resources from similarly impactful but less celebrated scholars. Despite this paradox, knowledge of how…
In software-engineering research, many empirical studies are conducted with open-source or industry developers. However, in contrast to other research communities like economics or psychology, only few experiments use financial incentives…
When users lack specific knowledge of various system parameters, their uncertainty may lead them to make undesirable deviations in their decision making. To alleviate this, an informed system operator may elect to signal information to…
To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible…
Understanding the emergence of cooperation in systems of computational agents is crucial for the development of effective cooperative AI. Interaction among individuals in real-world settings are often sparse and occur within a broad…
We use a controlled experiment to study how information acquisition impacts candidate evaluations. We provide evaluators with group-level information on performance and the opportunity to acquire additional, individual-level performance…
Throughout the years, social norms have been promoted as an informal enforcement mechanism for achieving beneficial collective outcomes. Among the most used methods to foster interactions, framing the context of a situation or setting…
Understanding how competitive pressure affects risk-taking is crucial in sequential decision-making under uncertainty. This study examines these effects using bench press competition data, where individuals make risk-based choices under…
We focus on how individual behavior that complies with social norms interferes with performance-based incentive mechanisms in organizations with multiple distributed decision-making agents. We model social norms to emerge from interactions…
Information about peers' performance is pervasive in workplaces, yet its effects on worker behavior are mixed. We show that a key reason is that workers differ in how they value such information. In a real-effort experiment with 793…
The development of cooperative relations within and between firms plays an important role in the successful implementation of business strategy. How to produce such relations is less well understood. We build on work in relational contract…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…