Evidence of general economic principles of bargaining and trade from 2,000 classroom experiments

Standardized classroom experiments provide evidence about how well scientific results reproduce when nearly identical methods are used. We use a sample of around 20,000 observations to test reproducibility of behaviour in trading and ultimatum bargaining. Double-auction results are highly reproducib...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature human behaviour 2020-09, Vol.4 (9), p.917-927
Main Authors: Lin, Po-Hsuan, Brown, Alexander L., Imai, Taisuke, Wang, Joseph Tao-yi, Wang, Stephanie W., Camerer, Colin F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
4014/159
4014/477
Auctions
Bargaining
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Classrooms
Commerce - economics
Economic theory
Experimental economics
Experimental Psychology
Experiments
Games, Experimental
Humans
Life Sciences
Markets
Microeconomics
Negotiating
Neurosciences
Personality and Social Psychology
Prices
Reaction Time - physiology
Reproducibility
Reproducibility of Results
Supply & demand
Trading
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Standardized classroom experiments provide evidence about how well scientific results reproduce when nearly identical methods are used. We use a sample of around 20,000 observations to test reproducibility of behaviour in trading and ultimatum bargaining. Double-auction results are highly reproducible and are close to equilibrium predictions about prices and quantities from economic theory. Our sample also shows robust correlations between individual surplus and trading order, and autocorrelation of successive price changes, which test different theories of price dynamics. In ultimatum bargaining, the large dataset provides sufficient power to identify that equal-split offers are accepted more often and more quickly than slightly unequal offers. Our results imply a general consistency of results across a variety of different countries and cultures in two of the most commonly used designs in experimental economics. Camerer et al. use standardized experiments across thousands of students to demonstrate empirical regularities in two-person bargaining and trading in markets. Bargaining outcomes lean toward equal sharing, and markets rapidly create prices that match supply and demand.
ISSN:2397-3374
2397-3374
DOI:10.1038/s41562-020-0916-8