Economic Games on the Internet: The Effect of $1 Stakes

Amir, Ofra; Rand, David G.; Gal, Ya'akov (Kobi)

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1968195

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Economic Games on the Internet: The Effect of $1 Stakes

PLoS ONE, Vol. 7, No. 2

6 Pages Posted: 5 Dec 2011 Last revised: 22 Feb 2012

See all articles by Ofra Amir

David G. Rand

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Ya'akov (Kobi) Gal

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Date Written: December 3, 2011

Abstract

Online labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) offer an unprecedented opportunity to run economic game experiments quickly and inexpensively. Using Mturk, we recruited 756 subjects and examined their behavior in four canonical economic games, with two payoff conditions each: a stakes condition, in which subjects' earnings were based on the outcome of the game (maximum earnings of $1); and a no-stakes condition, in which subjects' earnings are unaffected by the outcome of the game. Our results demonstrate that economic game experiments run on MTurk are comparable to those run in laboratory settings, even when using very low stakes.

Keywords: online markets, economic games, stakes

JEL Classification: C90

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Amir, Ofra and Rand, David G. and Gal, Ya'akov (Kobi), Economic Games on the Internet: The Effect of $1 Stakes (December 3, 2011). PLoS ONE, Vol. 7, No. 2 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1968195 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1968195