

6000 Chess Players Take Part in a "Beauty Contest" - mhb
http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=5621

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beefman
Hey, I participated in this. I guessed 0 the first round, and IIRC I raised my
estimate to 33 in the second round. I suppose the lesson is that I'm a poor
judge of human nature.

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manifold
I tried this experiment a few years ago with a roomful of actuaries, who I
suspected would be likely to "iterate" their response a few more times than
the average person, and the answer came out at 14.

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joez
Even in a room full of game theorists, will the winner be at one. There are a
few considerations. One is that one person who slips up either through a
misunderstanding or spite will throw off the average. Another consideration is
that if you win with zero or one, you will have to split any prize pool with
many other players.

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endtime
Yes, but if you guess higher than 0 (in, as you say, spite) then you only hurt
yourself, since everyone else ties for the win. The choice of 0 in this game
is a Nash equilibrium - no rational agent will guess otherwise, at least if it
assumes all other agents are also rational.

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gort
Assuming all other agents are rational is normally not rational.

Even in the case where all the agents _are_ rational, if they don't all know
that, they should still guess above zero.

Only if it's common knowledge that everyone will be implementing the strictly
"rational" strategy is guessing zero correct.

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endtime
This is true, but I was specifically addressing the case where a "spiteful"
agent attempts to guess high and throw off the average, and just pointing out
that this would actually hurt no one but the spiteful agent himself.

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jrp
Wikipedia page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average> "How
Real People Think in Strategic Games" (discusses game):
<http://www.msri.org/people/members/sara/articles/expecon.pdf>

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aneesh
This is basically a Keynesian Beauty Contest:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest>

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scythe
The results around 22 aren't too surprising: most people will probably quickly
figure out that the target cannot possibly be above 66.67, but few will
realize that this implies that the target will be below 44.44. If you assume
the guesses will be randomly distributed from 0 - 66, you get a target of 22,
which isn't a bad guess for most of the times this experiment was performed on
the proles.

