Fall Research Expo 2020

An Experiment in Identity and Coordination

This project was a part of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics department at Penn. I got to work under the guidance of Dr. Cristina Bicchieri and Dr. Abraham Aldama Navarrete and with Daniel Draganoff, a fellow research assistant and now a dear friend.

The macro question we wished to answer was the impact of recommendations on two player decision making. We wanted to learn on whether identity had an impact on this decision making and if institutions can use the results from our experiment towards better policy making.

We decided to look at a Hawk-Dove Game theoretic setting and replicate joint decision making through surveys made in Smatriqs. We used Amazon mTurk to find participants for the study.

A huge part of the project was building the surveys.

1. 2 person game with information on partner identity

2. 2 person game with no information on partner identity

3. 1 person game with information on robot decision making

Once these surveys were built, we spent time gathering data using mTurk and collating the data to then perform hypothesis testing on the results.

Through the experience, I learnt a new survey design environment (Smartriqs) and the inner workings of Amazon mTurk (a more common source of finding survey participants today). Abraham was kind enough to give us a lot of independence on these tasks which allowed me and Daniel to learn from our mistakes. Abraham also helped us to learn about hypothesis testing and writing research papers, it was an honor to complete writing the paper and then submitting it for publishing!

I am thankful to Daniel for being a great partner, to Abraham and Dr. Bicchieri for being great guides', and to PURM for offering me this opportunity.

PRESENTED BY
PURM - Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program
College of Arts & Sciences 2022
Advised By
Abraham Aldama Navarrete
PRESENTED BY
PURM - Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program
College of Arts & Sciences 2022
Advised By
Abraham Aldama Navarrete

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