Biomedical subjects

Amnon Rapoport

Publications and source records attributed to Amnon Rapoport.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Strategic behavior in monkeys.

In a recent paper, Lee et al. examined adaptive decision-making processes by training monkeys to play a competitive game against a computer programmed to play using various strategies. They found that the monkeys' responses were sensitive to the computer's strategies and consistent with reinforcement learning. Research such as this strongly complements current research in behavioral economics. We propose some potential future directions for this work, and put forward conjectures about what might be learned about decision-making in humans.

Animals↗

PubMed2002

Effects of financial incentives on the breakdown of mutual trust.

Disagreements between psychologists and economists about the need for and size of financial incentives continue to be hotly discussed. We examine the effects of financial incentives in a class of interactive decision-making situations, called centipede games, in which mutual trust is essential for cooperation. Invoking backward induction, the Nash equilibrium solution for these games is counterintuitive. Our previous research showed that when the number of players in the centipede game is increased from two to three, the game is iterated in time, the players are rematched, and the stakes are unusually high, behavior approaches equilibrium play. Results from the present study show that reducing the size of the stakes elicits dramatically different patterns of behavior. We argue that when mutual trust is involved, the magnitude of financial incentives can induce a considerable difference.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Bonus and Penalty in Common Pool Resource Dilemmas under Uncertainty.

Common pool resource (CPR) dilemmas constitute a class of social dilemmas in which equilibrium behavior results in Pareto deficient outcomes that are not at all desirable by the group. We focus on a class of CPR dilemmas that, in addition to strategic uncertainty about the harvesting behavior of the other group members, include environmental uncertainty about the size of the CPR. In an attempt to decrease the rate of requests from the common pool, and thereby increase individual payoffs, we extend previous research-both theoretically and experimentally-in two different directions. In the bonus treatment, a reward is given to the agent(s) who requests the least, and in the penalty treatment, a charge is imposed on the agent(s) who requests the most. We show that under equilibrium play the bonus treatment decreases total group request, whereas the penalty treatment increases it. Our experimental results do not support this prediction. Rather, both treatments considerably decrease the rate of request and, therefore, increase the rate of provision. The penalty treatment is shown to be more effective in reducing individual requests and enhancing provision rates than the bonus treatment. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.

Journal Article↗