Securing Victory or Not? Surrendering Optimal Play when Facing Simple Calculations -A Natural Experiment from the Swedish and US Jeopardy

Jenny Charlotta Säve-Söderbergh () and Gabriella Sjögren Lindquist
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Jenny Charlotta Säve-Söderbergh: Swedish Institute for Social Research - Stockholm University

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Abstract: This paper empirically investigates the common assumption of economic agents' capabilities to process complex mathematical problems to find optimal strategies applied in economic modeling. By exploiting a design difference in the game show Jeopardy between the U.S. and Sweden we obtain a natural experiment of individuals facing an optimization decision either having explicit information or deriving it by non-complex adding and subtracting. Given the assumption that individuals compute optimally, there should be no difference in the strategies used. Yet, the results show that even a small change in informational pre-conditions for obtaining an optimal strategy strongly alters economic-decision making.

Keywords: Social; Sciences; &; Humanities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-03-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00675398
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Published in Applied Economics, 2011, pp.1. ⟨10.1080/00036846.2010.522525⟩

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Journal Article: Securing victory or not? Surrendering optimal play when facing simple calculations -- a natural experiment from the Swedish and US Jeopardy (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00675398

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2010.522525

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