This paper synthesizes findings from an ongoing research program on learning in signaling games. The present paper focuses on crossgame learning (the ability of subjects to take what has been learned in one game and generalize it to related games), an issue that has been ignored in most of the learning literature. We begin by laying out the basic experimental design and recapitulating early results characterizing the learning process. We then report results from an initial experiment in which we find a surprising degree of positive cross-game learning, contrary to the predictions of commonly employed learning models and to the findings of cognitive psychologists. We next explore two features of the environment that help to explain when and why this positive transfer occurs. First, we examine the effects of abstract versus meaningful context, an issue that has been largely ignored by economists out of the belief that behavior is largely dictated by the deep mathematical structure of a game. In contrast, results from cognitive psychology suggest that behavior may well be sensitive to context employed. Our results show that the use of meaningful context serves as a catalyst for positive transfer. Second, we explore how play by two-person teams differs from play by individuals. The psychology literature is quite pessimistic about the ability of teams to beat a "truth wins" standard based on performance of individuals. But teams easily surpass this norm in our cross-game experiment. We use the dialogues between team members to gain insight into how this transfer occurs, gaining direct confirmation for hypotheses generated by econometric analysis of earlier data.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)