IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cea/doctra/e2003_47.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Teaching Nash Equilibrium and Strategy Dominance: A Classroom Experiment on the Beauty Contest

Author

Listed:

Abstract

The aim of this investigation is to display how the use of classroom experiments may be a good pedagogical tool to teach the Nash equilibrium (NE) concept. The basic game for our purposes is a repeated version of the Beauty Contest Game (BCG), a simple guessing game whose repetition lets students react to other players’ choices and to converge iteratively to the equilibrium solution. We performed this experiment with undergraduate students without any previous knowledge about game theory. After four rounds, we observed in all groups a clear decreasing tendency in the average chosen number. So, our findings prove that, by playing a repeated BCG, students quickly learn how to reach the NE solution.

Suggested Citation

  • Virtudes Alba Fernández & Pablo Brañas Garza & Francisca Jiménez Jiménez & Javier Rodero Cosano, 2003. "Teaching Nash Equilibrium and Strategy Dominance: A Classroom Experiment on the Beauty Contest," Economic Working Papers at Centro de Estudios Andaluces E2003/47, Centro de Estudios Andaluces.
  • Handle: RePEc:cea:doctra:e2003_47
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://public.centrodeestudiosandaluces.es/pdfs/E200347.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Duffy, John & Nagel, Rosemarie, 1997. "On the Robustness of Behaviour in Experimental "Beauty Contest" Games," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 107(445), pages 1684-1700, November.
    2. Shinichi Hirota & Shyam Sunder, 2002. "Stock Market as a 'Beauty Contest': Investor Beliefs and Price Bubbles sans Dividend Anchors," Yale School of Management Working Papers ysm2, Yale School of Management.
    3. Brit Grosskopf & Rosemarie Nagel, 2007. "Rational reasoning or adaptive behavior? Evidence from two-person beauty contest games," Economics Working Papers 1068, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Virtudes Alba Fernández & Pablo Brañas-Garza & Francisca Jiménez Jiménez & Javier Rodero Cosano, 2004. "Communication, coordination and competition in the beauty contest game: Eleven classroom experiments," ThE Papers 04/-1, Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the University of Granada..

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Robert Slonim, 2005. "Competing Against Experienced and Inexperienced Players," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 8(1), pages 55-75, April.
    2. Nagel, Rosemarie & Bühren, Christoph & Frank, Björn, 2017. "Inspired and inspiring: Hervé Moulin and the discovery of the beauty contest game," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 191-207.
    3. Martin G. Kocher & Matthias Sutter, 2005. "The Decision Maker Matters: Individual Versus Group Behaviour in Experimental Beauty-Contest Games," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 115(500), pages 200-223, January.
    4. David L. Dickinson & Todd McElroy, 2009. "Naturally-occurring sleep choice and time of day effects on p-beauty contest outcomes," Working Papers 09-03, Department of Economics, Appalachian State University.
    5. Grosskopf, Brit & Nagel, Rosemarie, 2008. "The two-person beauty contest," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 62(1), pages 93-99, January.
    6. Martin G. Kocher & Matthias Sutter & Florian Wakolbinger, 2007. "The Impact of Naïve Advice and Observational Learning in Beauty-contest Games," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 07-015/1, Tinbergen Institute.
    7. Kocher, Martin & Strau[ss], Sabine & Sutter, Matthias, 2006. "Individual or team decision-making--Causes and consequences of self-selection," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 56(2), pages 259-270, August.
    8. Mazzocco, Ketti & Cherubini, Anna Maria & Cherubini, Paolo, 2013. "On the short horizon of spontaneous iterative reasoning in logical puzzles and games," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 121(1), pages 24-40.
    9. George-Marios Angeletos & Chen Lian, 2018. "Forward Guidance without Common Knowledge," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(9), pages 2477-2512, September.
    10. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Saten Kumar & Jane Ryngaert, 2021. "Do You Know that I Know that You Know…? Higher-Order Beliefs in Survey Data," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 136(3), pages 1387-1446.
    11. Baethge, Caroline, 2016. "Performance in the beauty contest: How strategic discussion enhances team reasoning," Passauer Diskussionspapiere, Betriebswirtschaftliche Reihe B-17-16, University of Passau, Faculty of Business and Economics.
    12. Chesney, Thomas & Chuah, Swee-Hoon & Hoffmann, Robert, 2009. "Virtual world experimentation: An exploratory study," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 72(1), pages 618-635, October.
    13. Choo, Lawrence C.Y & Kaplan, Todd R., 2014. "Explaining Behavior in the "11-20" Game," MPRA Paper 52808, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Kocher, Martin G. & Sutter, Matthias, 2006. "Time is money--Time pressure, incentives, and the quality of decision-making," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 61(3), pages 375-392, November.
    15. Hong, Jieying & Moinas, Sophie & Pouget, Sébastien, 2021. "Learning in speculative bubbles: Theory and experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 185(C), pages 1-26.
    16. Alessandro Lanteri & Anna Carabelli, 2011. "Beauty contested: how much of Keynes' remains in behavioural economics' beauty contests?," The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(2), pages 269-285.
    17. Tomasz Kopczewski, 2011. "Auto-selection in an Online Experiment, p-Beauty Contest Game," Ekonomia journal, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw, vol. 26.
    18. Virtudes Alba-Fernández & Pablo Brañas-Garza & Francisca Jiménez-Jiménez & Javier Rodero-Cosano, 2004. "Communication, coordination and competition in the beauty contest game: Eleven classroom experiments," IESA Working Papers Series 0416, Institute for Social Syudies of Andalusia - Higher Council for Scientific Research.
    19. Guth, Werner & Kocher, Martin & Sutter, Matthias, 2002. "Experimental 'beauty contests' with homogeneous and heterogeneous players and with interior and boundary equilibria," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 74(2), pages 219-228, January.
    20. Nax, Heinrich Harald & Newton, Jonathan, 2022. "Deep and shallow thinking in the long run," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 17(4), November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Classroom Experiments; Beauty Contest Game; Teaching; Nash Equilibrium.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A22 - General Economics and Teaching - - Economic Education and Teaching of Economics - - - Undergraduate
    • C99 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Other
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cea:doctra:e2003_47. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Susana Mérida (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fcanges.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.