Four Contributions to Experimental Economics

Abstract

This thesis is about binary decisions participants make in a laboratory environment. For this purpose, laboratory experiments are conducted to investigate effects of individual decision making in a microeconomic context. The first chapter is a short introduction and will give an overview over the next four chapters In the second chapter comparisons between theories in stationary 2x2 games and empirical data are investigated. Twelve 2x2 games have been played in the laboratory and the results have been compared with 5 stationary concepts. The third chapter reports experimental results on a simple coordination game in which two players can coordinate either on an equal distribution of payoffs or on a Pareto superior but unequal distribution of payoffs. The fourth chapter reports on simulations applied on two similar congestion games: the first is the classical minority game. The second one is an asymmetric variation of the minority game with linear payoff functions. The fifth and last chapter reports results of laboratory experiments about traffic behavior of participants with different cultural backgrounds. The minority game as an elementary traffic scenario was chosen, in which human participants of a German and Chinese subject pool had to choose over 100 periods between a road A and a road B.