An Experimental Investigation on Learning and Context Effects

Marco Novarese, Chiara Chelini, Anna Spada, Angela Ambrosino and Carla Trigona

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper revisited Gregory Bateson’s theory of hierarchical learning through an experiment testing the existence of context effect and learning spill-over in two following games: a coordination game and a two-step battle-of-the sexes. The first part of the experiment is seen as a kind of training period. The different treatments of the coordination game are, in fact, designed so to reinforce different representations of the games, requiring to look at different aspects of a series of images shown in the screen. The second game allows testing if differences in training determine different behaviors in a same situation. Our experiment suggests that the preliminary training influences how the second game is perceived. While the incentive structure of the battle-of-the sexes is not identical to the coordination game, the presence of an image determines a different kind of context similarity with the previous one.

Keywords: hierarchical learning; Bateson; experiment; context effects; coordination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B50 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-12-27
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/27807/1/MPRA_paper_27807.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/36956/1/MPRA_paper_36956.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:27807

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