The Decision Maker Matters: Individual versus Group Behaviour in Experimental Beauty-Contest Games

Martin Georg Kocher () and Matthias Sutter ()

Papers on Strategic Interaction from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group

Abstract: Economics has devoted little attention so far as to whether the type of decision maker matters for economic decisions. However, many important decisions like those on monetary policy or a company's business strategy are made by (small) groups rather than an individual. We compare behaviour of individuals and small groups in an experimental beauty-contest game. Our findings suggest that groups are not smarter decision makers per se, but that they learn faster than individuals. When individuals compete against groups, the latter significantly outperform the former in terms of payoff.

Keywords: beauty-contest experiments; group behavior; individual behavior; learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 C92 D70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-mic and nep-pol
Date: 2004-02
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://papers.mpiew-jena.mpg.de/esi/discussionpapers/2004-09.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Decision Maker Matters: Individual Versus Group Behaviour in Experimental Beauty-Contest Games (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esi:discus:2004-09

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.econ.mpg. ... arch/ESI/discuss.php

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Strategic Interaction from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Strategic Interaction Group
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Karin Richter ().