A professor did something similar to the twenty dollar auctions in one of my classes (environmental psychology). I’m highly confused about my memory because the outcome still seems to me unrealistically stupid, but as far as I try I can’t find anything out of place with my memory of it.
If I remember correctly the offer was 500€, from her pockets (I’m sure about the money being around this sum because I remember going “WHAT?!”, I remember it was only one banknote and I would have been a lot less impressed by 100€ or 50€). Students had to wrote in a piece of paper how much money they would accept, and that money would be divided equally amongst all the lowest offers.
She flat out explained before voting that if we’d all wrote 500€ we’d each gain the 16.55ish €, didn’t tried to ramp up suspicions about other students not cooperating.
I wrote 500€, more as a way to vote and make a statement of choosing smart cooperation over dumb competition, since I understood what the point she wanted to make was right away.
I was feeling pretty sure that one people would walk away with something close to 20-30€, but I had too much aversion for the intuitive stupidity of bidding enough lower I’d have a true chance at some profit, with the result of throwing 480€ or more of collective profits out of the window. (I was sure the game would go the professor’s way not because I had a good model of how these things usually turn out, but because I was sure she was a smart professor who didn’t wanted to lose 500€).
I thought that, to be safe to win I’d have to offer around € 10-13, since people wouldn’t bid much lower than the individual profit they’d gain from cooperating (not a good model of how people think), and that sum wasn’t worth me in some way choosing dumb competition over smart cooperation.
To this day I still can’t model accurately what went through the head of the student who wrote something around 20 cents.
I sincerely hope it was something more like “whatever” than decision theory. I think two other students went 2€ or lower.
If I remember correctly the professor claimed her annual loss for the game, one game every year, were an average of 7€, I remember I was impressed on how bad we did even in comparison to other classes.
That was one hell of a way to hammer in a point about how hard it is too cooperate to protect collective utilities (common resources in that case).
A professor did something similar to the twenty dollar auctions in one of my classes (environmental psychology). I’m highly confused about my memory because the outcome still seems to me unrealistically stupid, but as far as I try I can’t find anything out of place with my memory of it.
If I remember correctly the offer was 500€, from her pockets (I’m sure about the money being around this sum because I remember going “WHAT?!”, I remember it was only one banknote and I would have been a lot less impressed by 100€ or 50€). Students had to wrote in a piece of paper how much money they would accept, and that money would be divided equally amongst all the lowest offers.
She flat out explained before voting that if we’d all wrote 500€ we’d each gain the 16.55ish €, didn’t tried to ramp up suspicions about other students not cooperating.
I wrote 500€, more as a way to vote and make a statement of choosing smart cooperation over dumb competition, since I understood what the point she wanted to make was right away.
I was feeling pretty sure that one people would walk away with something close to 20-30€, but I had too much aversion for the intuitive stupidity of bidding enough lower I’d have a true chance at some profit, with the result of throwing 480€ or more of collective profits out of the window. (I was sure the game would go the professor’s way not because I had a good model of how these things usually turn out, but because I was sure she was a smart professor who didn’t wanted to lose 500€).
I thought that, to be safe to win I’d have to offer around € 10-13, since people wouldn’t bid much lower than the individual profit they’d gain from cooperating (not a good model of how people think), and that sum wasn’t worth me in some way choosing dumb competition over smart cooperation.
To this day I still can’t model accurately what went through the head of the student who wrote something around 20 cents.
I sincerely hope it was something more like “whatever” than decision theory. I think two other students went 2€ or lower.
If I remember correctly the professor claimed her annual loss for the game, one game every year, were an average of 7€, I remember I was impressed on how bad we did even in comparison to other classes.
That was one hell of a way to hammer in a point about how hard it is too cooperate to protect collective utilities (common resources in that case).