A computer will randomly assign you to a
4-member group. You will not know who your group members and neither will they learn your identity.
You will remain in this same group, with the same 3 other participants, for the duration of the experiment.
All of you will participate in 4 independent rounds of decision-making within the group.
At the start of the first three rounds, a computer will randomly assign you to a new position
within your 4-member group: “position 1”, “position 2”, “position 3”, or “position 4”. You will
be in each position only once, so will each member of your group.
Two urns
There are two “urns” (containers) which are labelled as the “Blue” urn
and the “Red” urn.
The “Red” urn contains
2
red
balls and
1
blue ball:
“Red” urn:
The “Blue” urn contains
2
blue
balls and
1
red ball:
“Blue” urn:
At the beginning of
each round, a computer will
randomly select one of these urns
with an equal
50% probability. Neither you nor other members of your group are
informed as to which urn is selected for the round. The selected urn will be the
same urn for
all members of your 4-member group
for that particular round.
We will call this selected urn the “group urn”.
Your task
In each round, each participant’s ultimate task is to correctly guess which of the two urns has
actually been selected by the computer as the group urn for that round.
Each of your group members, including you, will make her/his group urn guess one after the other, according
to her/his position in sequence within the group in each round.
For example, if you are in position 2, you are
the second person guessing the group urn in that round. Two other members of your group,
assigned to position 3 and position 4, will guess after you. The member in position 1 will guess before you.
Whether you will receive the bonus will be determined exclusively by whether you correctly guess
the randomly selected group urn (see
Bonus payment
on the next page for further explanation).