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This is an experiment in two-person decision making. You will be able to earn more money depending on the decisions you make in the experiment and the decisions made by others.

There will be 20 rounds in the experiment, each round lasting for 1 minute. In each round you will be presented with a two-person decision problem (or game) in which you will be asked to choose between two actions labeled A and B. You will face another person who also will be choosing between two actions A and B and depending on your choice and that of your pair member, each of you will earn money.

To illustrate what a decision problem will look like, consider Table 1 below. (This is just a hypothetical example; the payoffs in your decision problems will not be for the amounts portrayed here):

Your Opponent's Decision
A B
Your Decision A 1000, 225 5, 25000
B 80, 10,000 225, 10,000

In this and every other decision problem you will be the player choosing the rows and your opponent will choose the columns. In this game you have two choices: Row A and Row B. The entries in the table describe your payoff and that of your opponent in points, depending on the choice both of you make. These points will be converted into dollars at the end of the experiment at the rate of 1 point = $ {{ session.config.real_world_currency_per_point }}. For example, say that you and your opponent both make choice A. Then the cell in the upper left hand corner of the table is relevant since it is the cell in the table associated with the choice if A for both you and your opponent. In this cell you see two dollar amounts, 1000 points and 225 points. The first payoff on the left is your (the Row chooser’s) payoff (1000), while the payoff to the right (225) is the payoff to the column chooser, your opponent. The same is true for all the other cells which are relevant when different choices are made: the first payoff is your payoff while the second payoff is that of your opponent’s. For example, if you choose Row B and your opponent chooses Column A, then the cell in the lower left hand corner of the table is relevant and you will receive a payoff of 80 points while your opponent will receive a payoff of 10,000 points.

In each round of the experiment, after you hit a button to start that round, you will have a new decision problem (game) placed on the screen and it will remain on the screen for 1 minute. At each instant during that minute we ask you to think of what choice you would like to make (Row A or Row B). To enter your decision hit the A or B button placed below the decision problem. Put differently, as you look at the game during the 1 minute you have you may start out thinking that a particular decision is best but later change your mind about which row to choose. We will allow you to change your mind by hitting the button associated with what you consider to be the better choice. At the end of the minute, however, instead of using your last decision as your final choice, we will choose one instant (one second) at random and enter the choice you made at that second as your payoff-relevant choice for the game to be used against the choice of your opponent.

In each round of the experiment, after you hit a button to start that round, you will have a new decision problem (game) placed on the screen and it will remain on the screen for 1 minute. At each instant during that minute we ask you to think of what choice you would like to make (Row A or Row B). To enter your decision hit the A or B button placed below the decision problem. Put differently, as you look at the game during the 1 minute you have you may start out thinking that a particular decision is best but later change your mind about which row to choose. We will allow you to change your mind by hitting the button associated with what you consider to be the better choice. At the end of the minute, however, instead of using your last decision as your final choice, we will choose one instant (one second) at random and enter the choice you made at that second as your payoff-relevant choice for the game to be used against the choice of your opponent.

Because the computer will choose one second in the 1 minute interval and look at the choice you made there to determine your payoff, it is in your interest at every second to make sure that you enter the row that you think is best given your deliberations. So always make sure you have entered that decision that you think is best as time goes on. You are free to change your mind as time proceeds.

There are several things to note about this experiment.

  1. If at any time you do not have a decision entered and the computer chooses that time as payoff relevant, then you will receive a zero payoff in that game. This is only relevant at the very beginning of the round before you have made your very first choice. For example, say you take 3 seconds to make your first choice and the computer chooses your decision at second 2 as the payoff-relevant one. Since at that time you had not made a choice, you will get zero dollars for that game. To avoid such a thing happening, we urge you to make a first decision as fast as you can when a new round starts so as to avoid a zero payoff. You can change it at any time if you want to.
  2. The opponent you face will be taken from a set of randomly chosen people who played these games without any time limit but who made only one choice and did not have to decide, as you do, during 1 minute. So for each such game your opponent thought about the game and made one choice of a column. Your decision of a row will be matched with their column choice.
  3. Between rounds we will not tell you what your payoff is. You will have to finish all 20 rounds before we tell you your payoffs.
  4. Finally, although you engage in 20 decision problems, we will randomly choose 4 of those problems as relevant for your payoff. For each game we choose we will match your decision (as described above) with that of your opponent and you will receive the sum of your payoffs in those games as your final payoff in the experiment. In addition, you will be paid a fixed fee of {{ session.config.participation_fee }} as posted on the advertisement about this experiment.
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