Confusion and Reinforcement Learning in Experimental Public Goods Games

Ralph-C Bayer (), Elke Renner and Rupert Sausgruber ()

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: We use a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion in an experimental, repeated public goods game. The results show that reinforcement learning leads to dynamics similar to those observed in standard public goods games. However, closer inspection shows that individual decay of contributions in standard public goods games cannot be fully explained by reinforcement learning. According to our estimates, learning only accounts for 41 percent of the decay in contributions in standard public goods games. The contribution dynamics of subjects, who are identified as conditional cooperators, differ strongly from the learning dynamics, while a learning model estimated from the limited information treatment tracks behavior for subjects, who cannot be classified as conditional cooperators, reasonably well.

Keywords: public goods experiments; learning; limited information; confusion; conditional cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D83 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38
Date: 2009-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-pbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c4041030/wpaper/2009-22.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Confusion and Reinforcement Learning in Experimental Public Goods Games (2009)
Working Paper: Confusion and Reinforcement Learning in Experimental Public Good Games (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inn:wpaper:2009-22

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