TITLE:
Strategy Preference Distribution in the Weakest-Link Game: An Analysis Based on Lab Experiments
AUTHORS:
Yang Huang, Jun Wu, Ya Zhou, Keqiang Li
KEYWORDS:
Weakest-Link Game, Equilibrium Selection, Strategy Preference, Expectation
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.4 No.5,
May
16,
2016
ABSTRACT: As many researchers
mentioned, in addition to players’ different strategy preferences, the expectation
towards other players’ behavior will jointly affect the coordination level in
the weakest-link game. Then how to analyze those factors? To some extent, those
factors can be depicted by players’ choices in the first round. With the data
from several lab experiments, the strategy preferences distribution is
discussed in this paper. It is concluded that the overall distribution of the
players’ initial choices is left skewed, indicating that the players have the
motivation to pursue more payoff and the altruistic preference in observed in
the beginning of the game. Also, this distribution has no significant
difference among all the lab experiments with different treatments, which shows
that different coordination levels in the end of different experiment are not
due to the initial choice distribution difference. At the same time, no
significant distribution difference is found different gender, major in high
school and college of players. But then we take a look at the rank of the seven
choices, there is significant difference, which shows that different treatment
might induce a little difference of the expectation towards other players’
behavior, although the overall distribution might be the same.