Card Games and Financial Crises

43 Pages Posted: 9 Nov 2012 Last revised: 24 Jan 2014

See all articles by Leonardo Becchetti

Leonardo Becchetti

University of Rome Tor Vergata - Faculty of Economics

Maurizio Fiaschetti

UCL Institute of Finance and Technology

Giancarlo Marini

University of Rome Tor Vergata - Faculty of Economics

Date Written: November 9, 2012

Abstract

There may be a nexus between card games and financial markets. Akerlof and Shiller (2010) ask whether the decline in the number of bridge players and the growth in the number of poker players may have led to the current bad financial traders’ practices which are responsible for the global financial crisis. The reason is that bridge is a cooperative game generally played without monetary payoffs, while poker is an individualistic game with monetary payoffs. We simulate trust and dictator game experiments on a large sample of affiliated bridge and poker players. We find that bridge players make more polarized choices and send significantly more than poker players as trustors, a result which is reinforced when corrected for risk aversion and dictator giving. Overall, our findings do not reject the hypothesis that bridge practice is associated with a relatively higher disposition to team reasoning and strategic altruism.

Keywords: trust games, financial crisis, poker, bridge

JEL Classification: C72, C91, A13

Suggested Citation

Becchetti, Leonardo and Fiaschetti, Maurizio and Marini, Giancarlo, Card Games and Financial Crises (November 9, 2012). CEIS Working Paper No. 256, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2173413 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2173413

Leonardo Becchetti (Contact Author)

University of Rome Tor Vergata - Faculty of Economics ( email )

Via Columbia, 2
I-00133 Rome
Italy

Maurizio Fiaschetti

UCL Institute of Finance and Technology ( email )

Gower Street
London, WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

Giancarlo Marini

University of Rome Tor Vergata - Faculty of Economics ( email )

Via Columbia n.2
Rome, 00100
Italy

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
153
Abstract Views
1,842
Rank
410,345
PlumX Metrics