Claire's pilot

Instructions

Hello. This is a pilot survey to help me develop an experiment. Answers are completely anonymous. It should take about 5-10 minutes and you can exit the survey at any time.

On the next pages, I am going to give you a description of some ‘economic games’. Economic games are designed to reflect real-life situations. In a typical economic game, people who don’t know each other are put together, and are given tokens by an experimenter. They then are given a choice of what to do with their tokens. The number of tokens each person has at the end of the game is exchanged for money. During these games, people are anonymous (real names are not used, and people don’t know who they are playing with).

Your task today is to read a description of an ‘economic game’ and then to think of a real-life situation that this description reminds you of. It could be a situation you experienced, or an imaginary one that you think resembles the game. You don’t need to justify why you think the situation is similar, just describe it in a few sentences.

I'm ready to see the first description

Person A has some tokens and person B has no tokens. Person A must decide whether or not to give any of their tokens to person B. Person B knows how many tokens person A has.

Person A is shown some tokens and must choose how many of these tokens they should offer to person B. Person B is told how many tokens person A was given, how many they are offering. Person B must then decide if they accept person A’s offer or not. If they accept, the tokens are split as person A suggested, if they do not accept, neither persons A or B get any tokens.

Person A has some tokens and must decided whether or not to give any to person B (they can give as few or as many as they like). Any tokens person A gives to person B will be doubled. Person B must then decide whether or not to give any tokens back to person A.

Persons A has some tokens and person B has no tokens. Person A must decide whether or not to give any of their tokens to person B. Person C, who also has some tokens, sees what person A does. They can choose to remove tokens from person A. It costs person C one token to remove two tokens from person A. The tokens person C spends, and the tokens taken from person A are lost.

There is a group of four people. Each person in the group is given the same number of tokens. Each person must decide whether to keep the tokens, or to put them in a group pot. They can put in as few or as many as they like, and their choice is anonymous (they don’t see what the other people put in, and the other people don’t see what they put in). Once everyone has decided how many tokens to put in the group pot, the group pot is doubled and divided equally between all the group members. Therefore, the total number of tokens a person has at the end of the game is their share of the group pot plus the tokens they kept.

That's it! Thank you very much. If you have any comments, please let me know!

If you cannot think of an example, just say that and skip to the next one!