Extension to “Market Interaction and Efficient Cooperation” (Brandts and Riedl, 2018)

Last registered on December 30, 2018

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Extension to “Market Interaction and Efficient Cooperation” (Brandts and Riedl, 2018)
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0003668
Initial registration date
December 13, 2018

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
December 30, 2018, 10:08 PM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
Instituto de Analisis Economico

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Maastricht University

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2018-12-14
End date
2019-01-31
Secondary IDs
Abstract
We present an extension of the experiments reported in our paper “Market Interaction and Efficient Cooperation” (Brandts and Riedl, 2018). The extension consists in conducting an additional treatment of the “Only Social Dilemma Game” (OSDG), in which, before the OSDG itself, participants can earn money in an individual real-effort task. Our objective is to compare the data from the new treatment with those from one previous treatment, called Market-Partners (MP), reported in our paper. In th MP treatment participants played a social-dilemma game after having interacted and earned money in a double-auction market. In our new treatment participants will play the social dilemma after having earned money in a real-effort task.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Brandts, Jordi and Arno Riedl. 2018. "Extension to “Market Interaction and Efficient Cooperation” (Brandts and Riedl, 2018)." AEA RCT Registry. December 30. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.3668-1.0
Former Citation
Brandts, Jordi and Arno Riedl. 2018. "Extension to “Market Interaction and Efficient Cooperation” (Brandts and Riedl, 2018)." AEA RCT Registry. December 30. https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/3668/history/39699
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
We call the new treatment OSDG-IT, where IT stands for individual task. This treatment is an exact copy of the MP treatment except that the double-auction market is replaced by the individual task.

In the experiment participants will earn experimental currency units (ECU) which are converted to Euro at the end of the experiment as described in Brandts and Reidl (2018). The individual task will consist of 18 rounds in which participants will be able to earn ECU. Each of the 18 rounds will last for 95 seconds, which is the average length of a market round in the MP treatment. In each of these rounds participants will face the task of adjusting six sliders in the well-known slider task of Gill and Prowse (2012). The task is to position each slider at 50. Each correctly adjusted slider will yield ECU to the participants.

In the individual task, participants will be divided into two groups which differ regarding the comensation per correctly positioned slider. One group, low-earners, will receive 3.15 ECU and the other group, high-earners, will receive 24.74 ECU. These compensations are chosen such that when all sliders in all rounds are positioned correctly, the (rounded) total earnings are equal to the average earnings of respectively buyers and sellers (340 and 2672, respectively) in the MP treatment. Participants will be informed of their own compensation before the start of the slider task.

To maximize the likelihood that all participants position all sliders correctly there will be two unpaid trial rounds before the first round of the individual task. In the first trial round there will be no time limit. The reason for having this trial round is to let participants learn about the individual task. In the second trial round there will be a time limit of 95 seconds, just as in the subsequent paid rounds of the individual task. This second trial is meant to familiarize participants with the time pressure under which they will have to work in the paid rounds of the individual task. In addition, during the individual task, participants will receive a warning message when they did not position correctly all 6 sliders in a round.

Mirroring the MP treatment, before the start of the individual task, participants will be informed about the first six rounds of the OSDG, which take place immediately after the individual task is finished. Here participants are also informed that in the OSDG they will be paired with one other participant to play the OSDG and that this other participant will have either (a) the same individual task compensation, (b) a better individual task compensation, or (c) a worse individual task compensation. After the slider task and before the 6 rounds of the OSDG this information will be repeated together with a summary of the most important elements of the OSDG (in the same way as in the MP treatment).

The exact value of the paired participant’s slider task compensation will not be communicated to participants. This information condition is parallel to the one we used in the social dilemma game of the MP treatment, where participants were informed of whether they were paired with a buyer or a seller. In the double-auction market of the MP treatment earnings were private information. Nevertheless, from the market dynamics buyers and sellers may have been able to infer that buyers were in a worse earnings position than sellers.

The described matching of participants leads to three pairings: pairs of participants with low compensation (low-low), pairs of participants with high compensation (high-high), and pairs of participants with one participant having a low and the other participant having a high compensation (low-high). In total it is planned to collect data of 174 participants (approximately) equally divided across the three different pairings, giving a targeted 29 pairs per compensation pairing (low-low, high-high, low-high). As some participants may not be reaching the maximum earnings in the individual task we expect to get about 20-25 pairs with (close to) maximum income per compensation pairing.
Intervention Start Date
2018-12-14
Intervention End Date
2018-12-15

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Contribution levels in the social dilemma game.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We call the new treatment OSDG-IT, where IT stands for individual task. This treatment is an exact copy of the MP treatment except that the double-auction market is replaced by the individual task.

In the experiment participants will earn experimental currency units (ECU) which are converted to Euro at the end of the experiment as described in Brandts and Reidl (2018). The individual task will consist of 18 rounds in which participants will be able to earn ECU. Each of the 18 rounds will last for 95 seconds, which is the average length of a market round in the MP treatment. In each of these rounds participants will face the task of adjusting six sliders in the well-known slider task of Gill and Prowse (2012). The task is to position each slider at 50. Each correctly adjusted slider will yield ECU to the participants.

In the individual task, participants will be divided into two groups which differ regarding the compensation per correctly positioned slider. One group, low-earners, will receive 3.15 ECU and the other group, high-earners, will receive 24.74 ECU. These compensations are chosen such that when all sliders in all rounds are positioned correctly, the (rounded) total earnings are equal to the average earnings of respectively buyers and sellers (340 and 2672, respectively) in the MP treatment. Participants will be informed of their own compensation before the start of the slider task.

To maximize the likelihood that all participants position all sliders correctly there will be two unpaid trial rounds before the first round of the individual task. In the first trial round there will be no time limit. The reason for having this trial round is to let participants learn about the individual task. In the second trial round there will be a time limit of 95 seconds, just as in the subsequent paid rounds of the individual task. This second trial is meant to familiarize participants with the time pressure under which they will have to work in the paid rounds of the individual task. In addition, during the individual task, participants will receive a warning message when they did not position correctly all 6 sliders in a round.

Mirroring the MP treatment, before the start of the individual task, participants will be informed about the first six rounds of the OSDG, which take place immediately after the individual task is finished. Here participants are also informed that in the OSDG they will be paired with one other participant to play the OSDG and that this other participant will have either (a) the same individual task compensation, (b) a better individual task compensation, or (c) a worse individual task compensation. After the slider task and before the 6 rounds of the OSDG this information will be repeated together with a summary of the most important elements of the OSDG (in the same way as in the MP treatment).

The exact value of the paired participant’s slider task compensation will not be communicated to participants. This information condition is parallel to the one we used in the social dilemma game of the MP treatment, where participants were informed of whether they were paired with a buyer or a seller. In the double-auction market of the MP treatment earnings were private information. Nevertheless, from the market dynamics buyers and sellers may have been able to infer that buyers were in a worse earnings position than sellers.

The described matching of participants leads to three pairings: pairs of participants with low compensation (low-low), pairs of participants with high compensation (high-high), and pairs of participants with one participant having a low and the other participant having a high compensation (low-high). In total it is planned to collect data of 174 participants (approximately) equally divided across the three different pairings, giving a targeted 29 pairs per compensation pairing (low-low, high-high, low-high). As some participants may not be reaching the maximum earnings in the individual task we expect to get about 20-25 pairs with (close to) maximum income per compensation pairing.

In summary: we propose new treatments in the experimental, which will be compared with treatments that were run in the past. The treatments we ran in the past can be seen as "controls".
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
Random assignment by computer to different conditions.
Randomization Unit
N/A
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
No clustering
Sample size: planned number of observations
192 students
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
192 students
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
LINEEX University of Valencia
IRB Approval Date
2018-12-10
IRB Approval Number
N/A

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

There is information in this trial unavailable to the public. Use the button below to request access.

Request Information

Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials