Error Cascades in Observational Learning: An Experiment on the Chinos Game

Francesco Feri, Miguel Meléndez-Jiménez (), Giovanni Ponti () and Fernando Vega-Redondo

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: The paper reports an experimental study based on a variant of the popular Chinos game, which is used as a simple but paradigmatic instance of observational learning. There are three players, arranged in sequence, each of whom wins a fixed price if she manages to guess the total number of coins lying in everybody's hands. Our evidence shows that, despite the remarkable frequency of equilibrium outcomes, deviations from optimal play are also significant. And when such deviations occur, we find that, for any given player position, the probability of a mistake is increasing in the probability of a mistake of her predecessors. This is what we call an error cascade, which we which we measure by way of two alternative models.

Keywords: positional learning; error cascades (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43
Date: 2008-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Error cascades in observational learning: An experiment on the Chinos game (2011)
Working Paper: Error Cascades in Observational Learning: An Experiment on the Chinos Game (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inn:wpaper:2008-21

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