2026-09-19T03:58:13Zhttps://dspace.mit.edu/server/oai/requestoai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/1280982022-01-01T07:28:28Zcom_1721.1_7582com_1721.1_7581col_1721.1_131023
Cashman, Matthew
(Matthew P.)
Sloan School of Management.
Sloan School of Management
2020-10-19T00:43:04Z
2020-10-19T00:43:04Z
2020
2020
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128098
1200234680
Thesis: S.M. in Management Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, May, 2020
Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 25-26).
Our ability to cooperate is one of the cornerstones of our success as a species, and the story of how humans have been able to put aside immediate personal gain in favor of a longer view is widely studied. We add to this literature by exploring certain seemingly irrational behaviors observed in economic games. This is a set of behaviors that look like misunderstandings of causality, and which are irrational or must be the result of a misunderstanding on a classical economic reading. However, modes of cognition such as those reflected in self-signaling theory may serve to explain how the seemingly irrational might sometimes be quite sensible. We elicit these behaviors using real-time multiplayer economic games and suggest mechanisms whereby players may incorporate the value of receiving certain signals themselves into their utility calculations, thus making for rational behavior--and rational inference--in cases where it is not obviously so. In particular, we demonstrate order effects in economic games with no information flow and we show systematic biases in estimates of what one's partners have done versus the population. Both of these phenomena are consistent with a combination of self-signaling and a limit on the direction of inference in time.
by Matthew Cashman.
S.M. in Management Research
S.M. in Management Research Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management
28 pages
eng
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
Sloan School of Management.
Causality and self-signaling in economic games
Thesis
application/pdf
2021-12-17T17:20:24Z
Publication
unknown
unknown
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<Abstract>Our ability to cooperate is one of the cornerstones of our success as a species, and the story of how humans have been able to put aside immediate personal gain in favor of a longer view is widely studied. We add to this literature by exploring certain seemingly irrational behaviors observed in economic games. This is a set of behaviors that look like misunderstandings of causality, and which are irrational or must be the result of a misunderstanding on a classical economic reading. However, modes of cognition such as those reflected in self-signaling theory may serve to explain how the seemingly irrational might sometimes be quite sensible. We elicit these behaviors using real-time multiplayer economic games and suggest mechanisms whereby players may incorporate the value of receiving certain signals themselves into their utility calculations, thus making for rational behavior--and rational inference--in cases where it is not obviously so. In particular, we demonstrate order effects in economic games with no information flow and we show systematic biases in estimates of what one's partners have done versus the population. Both of these phenomena are consistent with a combination of self-signaling and a limit on the direction of inference in time.</Abstract>
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