Alexander Vostroknutov - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Alexander Vostroknutov

Research paper thumbnail of Economics of Open Source: A Brief Literature Overview

In the last few years there was a significant increase of interest in open source software develo... more In the last few years there was a significant increase of interest in open source software development. The organization of work in open source projects is different from usual or hierarchical way (Neus, 2001) of writing software inside commercial firms. Open source software can be re-distributed without royalties and fees; it can be modified by any person and be re-distributed again; source code should be provided with the software (Weber, 2000).

Research paper thumbnail of Essays on preferences and decision making

Research paper thumbnail of Preferences over Consumption and Status

Theory and Decision, Feb 1, 2007

Experimental evidence suggests that individual consumption has not only personal value but also e... more Experimental evidence suggests that individual consumption has not only personal value but also enters the social part of the utility. Existing models of social preferences make ad hoc parametric assumptions about the nature of this duality. This creates a problem of experimental identification of preferences since without such assumptions it is impossible to distinguish whether consumption or social concerns are driving the behavior. Given observed choice, the Axiomatic model of preferences in this article makes it possible to unambiguously determine personal and social utility without any assumptions about their relationship. The unique separation can be achieved only if the individual choices in different subgroups of other people are available. Preferences over consumption and status are used as an example to demonstrate how the utility is constructed. The model shows what kind of information about choice is needed to empirically determine the nature of social preferences without making restrictive assumptions. This can help to estimate whether personal consumption or social value is more important in economic decisions.

Research paper thumbnail of A Theory of Reciprocity with Incomplete Information

A model of belief dependent preferences in finite multi-stage games with observable actions ispro... more A model of belief dependent preferences in finite multi-stage games with observable actions isproposed. It combines two dissimilar approaches: incomplete information (Levine, 1998) andintentionality (Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger, 2004; Falk and Fischbacher, 2006). Incompleteinformation is important because social preferences are not directly observable; intentions arefound to be indispensable in explaining behavior in games (Falk, Fehr, and Fischbacher, 2008). Inthe model it is assumed that the players have social attitudes that define their socialpreferences. In addition, players care differently about the payoffs of other players depending ontheir beliefs about their social attitude and possibly on the beliefs of higher orders. As thegame unfolds players update their beliefs about the types of other players. An action of a playershows intention when she chooses it anticipating future belief updating by others. A reasoningprocedure is proposed that allows players to understand how t...

Research paper thumbnail of Preferences over consumption and status

Theory and Decision, 2013

Experimental evidence suggests that individual consumption has not only personal value but also e... more Experimental evidence suggests that individual consumption has not only personal value but also enters the social part of the utility. Existing models of social preferences make ad hoc parametric assumptions about the nature of this duality. This creates a problem of experimental identification of preferences since without such assumptions it is impossible to distinguish whether consumption or social concerns are driving the behavior. Given observed choice, the Axiomatic model of preferences in this article makes it possible to unambiguously determine personal and social utility without any assumptions about their relationship. The unique separation can be achieved only if the individual choices in different subgroups of other people are available. Preferences over consumption and status are used as an example to demonstrate how the utility is constructed. The model shows what kind of information about choice is needed to empirically determine the nature of social preferences without making restrictive assumptions. This can help to estimate whether personal consumption or social value is more important in economic decisions.

Research paper thumbnail of Non-probabilistic decision making with memory constraints

Economics Letters, 2012

The single decision maker chooses one of the actions repeatedly. She chooses the action with the ... more The single decision maker chooses one of the actions repeatedly. She chooses the action with the highest weighted average of the past payoffs. In the long run either the action with highest expected payoff or the action with highest minimal payoff is chosen depending on how weights evolve.

Research paper thumbnail of Past Experience of Uncertainty affects Risk Preferences

Research paper thumbnail of Decision Making with Imperfect Knowledge of the State Space

We conduct an experiment to study how imperfect knowledge of the state space affects subsequent c... more We conduct an experiment to study how imperfect knowledge of the state space affects subsequent choices under uncertainty with perfect knowledge of the state space. Participants in our experiment choose between a sure outcome and a lottery in 32 periods. All treatments are exactly identical in periods 17 to 32 but differ in periods 1 to 16. In the early periods of the “Risk Treatment” there is perfect information about the lottery; in the “Ambiguity Treatment” participants perfectly know the outcome space but not the associated probabilities; in the “Unawareness Treatment” participants have imperfect knowledge about both outcomes and probabilities. All three treatments induce strong behavioural differences in periods 17 to 32. In particular participants who have been exposed to an environment with very imperfect knowledge of the state space subsequently choose lotteries with high (low) variance less (more) often compared to other participants. Estimating individual risk attitudes fr...

Research paper thumbnail of I'll cross that Bridge when I Come to It: Backward Induction as a Cognitive Process

We study experimentally how subjects plan ahead when they make sequential decisions. We use a sim... more We study experimentally how subjects plan ahead when they make sequential decisions. We use a simple combinatorial game of perfect information, with two players alternating, and with a winner and a loser. Subjects in the early stages follow the forward induction analysis, thinking about their possible moves, the subsequent possible moves of the other, and so on. Motivated by the experience of the early defeats they suddenly switch their mode of analysis to backward induc-tion. This pattern is common to all subjects, although the change may occur at different times. This way of learning the solution of the game is different from a complete backward induction procedure: Players are unable or unwilling to replace a sub-game with payoff defined by the optimal strategies in the sub-game. Our results indicate why people may find it difficult to plan their financial decisions effectively. JEL classification: D830; C720; C900. Keywords: Backward induction; learning; behavioral game theory. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Causes of social outcome differences encoded in human brain

Research paper thumbnail of Competition with Skill and Luck

Many decisions that people make are driven by the concerns for social ranking. We study experimen... more Many decisions that people make are driven by the concerns for social ranking. We study experimentally how strong the social ranking preferences are and what characteristics of others influence the perceived ranking. In our experiment the subjects play two games against the computer: a game of skill and a game of luck. After each game the participants observe the winnings of everybody in the group. Each subject has a possibility to reduce the winnings of one other person at a cost to himself. We find that the majority of subjects use this costly option. More importantly, the decisions to subtract money depend on whether the game of skill or luck was played. The pattern of subtractions suggests that winnings made with skill are used as a proxy for social significance and are envied, whereas money won by luck do not convey such a signal. JEL classification: C02, D81.

Research paper thumbnail of Awareness in Repeated Games

In this paper we provide a framework to reason about limited awareness of the action space in fin... more In this paper we provide a framework to reason about limited awareness of the action space in finitely repeated games. Our framework is rich enough to capture the full strategic aspect of limited awareness in a dynamic setting, taking into account the possibility that agents might want to reveal or conceal actions to their opponent or that they might become "aware of unawareness" upon observing non rationalizable behavior. We show that one can think of these situations as a game with incomplete information, which is fundamentally different, though, from the standard treatment of repeated games with incomplete information. We establish conditions on the "level of mutual awareness" of the action space needed to recover Nash and subgame perfect Nash equilibria from the standard theory with common knowledge. We also show that the set of sustainable payoffs in games with folk theorems does not relate in a monotone way to the "level of mutual awareness".

Research paper thumbnail of Past experience of uncertainty affects risk aversion

Experimental Economics, 2015

Research paper thumbnail of Growth and Inequality in Public Good Games

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Research paper thumbnail of The Social and Ecological Determinants of Common Pool Resource Sustainability

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

ABSTRACT We study a novel, repeated common pool resource game in which current resource stocks de... more ABSTRACT We study a novel, repeated common pool resource game in which current resource stocks depend on resource extraction in previous periods. Our model shows that for a sufficiently high regrowth rate, there is no commons dilemma: the resource will be preserved indefinitely in equilibrium. Lower growth rates lead to depletion. Laboratory tests of the model indicate that favorable ecological characteristics are necessary but insufficient to encourage effective CPR governance. However, using a method developed in Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2013), we identify behavioral types ex ante by observing individual willingness to follow a costly rule, and we show that assortative matching on type facilitates CPR management.

Research paper thumbnail of Merit and Justice: An Experimental Analysis of Attitude to Inequality

PLoS ONE, 2014

Merit and justice play a crucial role in ethical theory and political philosophy. Some theories v... more Merit and justice play a crucial role in ethical theory and political philosophy. Some theories view justice as allocation according to merit; others view justice as based on criteria of its own, and take merit and justice as two independent values. We study experimentally how these views are perceived. In our experiment subjects played two games (both against the computer): a game of skill and a game of luck. After each game they observed the earnings of all the subjects in the session, and thus the differences in outcomes. Each subject could reduce the winnings of one other person at a cost. The majority of the subjects used the option to subtract. The decision to subtract and the amount subtracted depended on whether the game was one of skill or luck, and on the distance between the earnings of the subject and those of others. Everything else being equal, subjects subtracted more in luck than in skill. In skill game, but not in luck, the subtraction becomes more likely, and the amount larger, as the distance increases. The results show that individuals considered favorable outcomes in luck to be undeserved, and thus felt more justified in subtracting. In the skill game instead, they considered more favorable outcomes (their own as well as others') as signal of ability and perhaps effort, which thus deserved merit; hence, they felt less motivated to subtract. However, a larger size of the unfavorable gap from the others increased the unpleasantness of poor performance, which in turn motivated larger subtraction. In conclusion, merit is attributed if and only if effort or skill significantly affect the outcome. An inequality of outcomes is viewed differently depending on whether merit causes the difference or not. Thus, merit and justice are strongly linked in the human perception of social order.

Research paper thumbnail of Norms Make Preferences Social

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

We explore a unifying explanation for prosocial behavior in which people care not about others' p... more We explore a unifying explanation for prosocial behavior in which people care not about others' payoffs per se, but whether their own behavior accords with social norms. Individuals who are sensitive to norms will adhere to them so long as they observe others doing the same. A model formalizing this generates heterogeneous prosociality without relying on explicit distributional preferences and provides clear testable predictions if norm-sensitivity is observable. We design a simple experiment that allows us to measure individual-level norm-sensitivity and we show that norm-sensitivity explains heterogeneity in prosociality in public goods, dictator, ultimatum, and trust games.

Research paper thumbnail of Rules, Rule-Following and Cooperation

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Rules are thought to persist to the extent that the direct benefits of having them (e.g. reduced ... more Rules are thought to persist to the extent that the direct benefits of having them (e.g. reduced transactions costs) exceed the costs of enforcement and of occasional misapplications. We argue that a second crucial role of rules is as screening mechanisms for identifying cooperative types. Thus we underestimate the social value of rules when we consider only their instrumental value in solving a particular problem. We demonstrate experimentally that costly rule-following can be used to screen for conditional cooperators. Subjects participate in a rule-following task in which they may incur costs to follow an arbitrary written rule in an individual choice setting. Without their knowledge, we sort them into groups according to their willingness to follow the rule. These groups then play repeated public goods or trust games. Rule-following groups sustain high public goods contributions over time, but in rule-breaking groups cooperation decays. Rulefollowers also reciprocate more in trust games. However, when individuals are not sorted by type, we observe no differences in the behavior of rule-followers and rule-breakers.

Research paper thumbnail of Causes of social reward differences encoded in human brain

Journal of Neurophysiology, 2012

Rewards may be due to skill, effort, and luck, and the social perception of inequality in rewards... more Rewards may be due to skill, effort, and luck, and the social perception of inequality in rewards among individuals may depend on what produced the inequality. Rewards due to skill produce a conflict: higher outcomes of others in this case are considered deserved, and this counters incentives to reduce inequality. However, they also signal superior skill and for this reason induce strong negative affect in those who perform less, which increases the incentive to reduce the inequality. The neurobiological mechanisms underlying evaluation of rewards due to skill, effort, and luck are still unknown. We scanned brain activity of subjects as they perceived monetary rewards caused by skill, effort, or luck. Subjects could subtract from others. Subtraction was larger, everything else being equal, in luck but increased more as the difference in outcomes grew in skill. Similarly, reward-related activation in medial orbitofrontal cortex was more sensitive to the difference in relative outcomes in skill trials. Orbitofrontal activation reflecting comparative reward advantage predicted by how much subjects reduced unfavorable reward inequality later on in the trial. Thus medial orbitofrontal cortex activity reflects the causes of reward and predicts actions that reduce inequality.

Research paper thumbnail of Experience and insight in the Race game

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2010

We study experimentally how subjects learn to plan ahead when they make sequential decisions. The... more We study experimentally how subjects learn to plan ahead when they make sequential decisions. The task is the Race game. This game is played on a finite set of m possible positions occupied by a marker, which is initially in the first position. Two players alternate ...

Research paper thumbnail of Economics of Open Source: A Brief Literature Overview

In the last few years there was a significant increase of interest in open source software develo... more In the last few years there was a significant increase of interest in open source software development. The organization of work in open source projects is different from usual or hierarchical way (Neus, 2001) of writing software inside commercial firms. Open source software can be re-distributed without royalties and fees; it can be modified by any person and be re-distributed again; source code should be provided with the software (Weber, 2000).

Research paper thumbnail of Essays on preferences and decision making

Research paper thumbnail of Preferences over Consumption and Status

Theory and Decision, Feb 1, 2007

Experimental evidence suggests that individual consumption has not only personal value but also e... more Experimental evidence suggests that individual consumption has not only personal value but also enters the social part of the utility. Existing models of social preferences make ad hoc parametric assumptions about the nature of this duality. This creates a problem of experimental identification of preferences since without such assumptions it is impossible to distinguish whether consumption or social concerns are driving the behavior. Given observed choice, the Axiomatic model of preferences in this article makes it possible to unambiguously determine personal and social utility without any assumptions about their relationship. The unique separation can be achieved only if the individual choices in different subgroups of other people are available. Preferences over consumption and status are used as an example to demonstrate how the utility is constructed. The model shows what kind of information about choice is needed to empirically determine the nature of social preferences without making restrictive assumptions. This can help to estimate whether personal consumption or social value is more important in economic decisions.

Research paper thumbnail of A Theory of Reciprocity with Incomplete Information

A model of belief dependent preferences in finite multi-stage games with observable actions ispro... more A model of belief dependent preferences in finite multi-stage games with observable actions isproposed. It combines two dissimilar approaches: incomplete information (Levine, 1998) andintentionality (Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger, 2004; Falk and Fischbacher, 2006). Incompleteinformation is important because social preferences are not directly observable; intentions arefound to be indispensable in explaining behavior in games (Falk, Fehr, and Fischbacher, 2008). Inthe model it is assumed that the players have social attitudes that define their socialpreferences. In addition, players care differently about the payoffs of other players depending ontheir beliefs about their social attitude and possibly on the beliefs of higher orders. As thegame unfolds players update their beliefs about the types of other players. An action of a playershows intention when she chooses it anticipating future belief updating by others. A reasoningprocedure is proposed that allows players to understand how t...

Research paper thumbnail of Preferences over consumption and status

Theory and Decision, 2013

Experimental evidence suggests that individual consumption has not only personal value but also e... more Experimental evidence suggests that individual consumption has not only personal value but also enters the social part of the utility. Existing models of social preferences make ad hoc parametric assumptions about the nature of this duality. This creates a problem of experimental identification of preferences since without such assumptions it is impossible to distinguish whether consumption or social concerns are driving the behavior. Given observed choice, the Axiomatic model of preferences in this article makes it possible to unambiguously determine personal and social utility without any assumptions about their relationship. The unique separation can be achieved only if the individual choices in different subgroups of other people are available. Preferences over consumption and status are used as an example to demonstrate how the utility is constructed. The model shows what kind of information about choice is needed to empirically determine the nature of social preferences without making restrictive assumptions. This can help to estimate whether personal consumption or social value is more important in economic decisions.

Research paper thumbnail of Non-probabilistic decision making with memory constraints

Economics Letters, 2012

The single decision maker chooses one of the actions repeatedly. She chooses the action with the ... more The single decision maker chooses one of the actions repeatedly. She chooses the action with the highest weighted average of the past payoffs. In the long run either the action with highest expected payoff or the action with highest minimal payoff is chosen depending on how weights evolve.

Research paper thumbnail of Past Experience of Uncertainty affects Risk Preferences

Research paper thumbnail of Decision Making with Imperfect Knowledge of the State Space

We conduct an experiment to study how imperfect knowledge of the state space affects subsequent c... more We conduct an experiment to study how imperfect knowledge of the state space affects subsequent choices under uncertainty with perfect knowledge of the state space. Participants in our experiment choose between a sure outcome and a lottery in 32 periods. All treatments are exactly identical in periods 17 to 32 but differ in periods 1 to 16. In the early periods of the “Risk Treatment” there is perfect information about the lottery; in the “Ambiguity Treatment” participants perfectly know the outcome space but not the associated probabilities; in the “Unawareness Treatment” participants have imperfect knowledge about both outcomes and probabilities. All three treatments induce strong behavioural differences in periods 17 to 32. In particular participants who have been exposed to an environment with very imperfect knowledge of the state space subsequently choose lotteries with high (low) variance less (more) often compared to other participants. Estimating individual risk attitudes fr...

Research paper thumbnail of I'll cross that Bridge when I Come to It: Backward Induction as a Cognitive Process

We study experimentally how subjects plan ahead when they make sequential decisions. We use a sim... more We study experimentally how subjects plan ahead when they make sequential decisions. We use a simple combinatorial game of perfect information, with two players alternating, and with a winner and a loser. Subjects in the early stages follow the forward induction analysis, thinking about their possible moves, the subsequent possible moves of the other, and so on. Motivated by the experience of the early defeats they suddenly switch their mode of analysis to backward induc-tion. This pattern is common to all subjects, although the change may occur at different times. This way of learning the solution of the game is different from a complete backward induction procedure: Players are unable or unwilling to replace a sub-game with payoff defined by the optimal strategies in the sub-game. Our results indicate why people may find it difficult to plan their financial decisions effectively. JEL classification: D830; C720; C900. Keywords: Backward induction; learning; behavioral game theory. ...

Research paper thumbnail of Causes of social outcome differences encoded in human brain

Research paper thumbnail of Competition with Skill and Luck

Many decisions that people make are driven by the concerns for social ranking. We study experimen... more Many decisions that people make are driven by the concerns for social ranking. We study experimentally how strong the social ranking preferences are and what characteristics of others influence the perceived ranking. In our experiment the subjects play two games against the computer: a game of skill and a game of luck. After each game the participants observe the winnings of everybody in the group. Each subject has a possibility to reduce the winnings of one other person at a cost to himself. We find that the majority of subjects use this costly option. More importantly, the decisions to subtract money depend on whether the game of skill or luck was played. The pattern of subtractions suggests that winnings made with skill are used as a proxy for social significance and are envied, whereas money won by luck do not convey such a signal. JEL classification: C02, D81.

Research paper thumbnail of Awareness in Repeated Games

In this paper we provide a framework to reason about limited awareness of the action space in fin... more In this paper we provide a framework to reason about limited awareness of the action space in finitely repeated games. Our framework is rich enough to capture the full strategic aspect of limited awareness in a dynamic setting, taking into account the possibility that agents might want to reveal or conceal actions to their opponent or that they might become "aware of unawareness" upon observing non rationalizable behavior. We show that one can think of these situations as a game with incomplete information, which is fundamentally different, though, from the standard treatment of repeated games with incomplete information. We establish conditions on the "level of mutual awareness" of the action space needed to recover Nash and subgame perfect Nash equilibria from the standard theory with common knowledge. We also show that the set of sustainable payoffs in games with folk theorems does not relate in a monotone way to the "level of mutual awareness".

Research paper thumbnail of Past experience of uncertainty affects risk aversion

Experimental Economics, 2015

Research paper thumbnail of Growth and Inequality in Public Good Games

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Research paper thumbnail of The Social and Ecological Determinants of Common Pool Resource Sustainability

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

ABSTRACT We study a novel, repeated common pool resource game in which current resource stocks de... more ABSTRACT We study a novel, repeated common pool resource game in which current resource stocks depend on resource extraction in previous periods. Our model shows that for a sufficiently high regrowth rate, there is no commons dilemma: the resource will be preserved indefinitely in equilibrium. Lower growth rates lead to depletion. Laboratory tests of the model indicate that favorable ecological characteristics are necessary but insufficient to encourage effective CPR governance. However, using a method developed in Kimbrough and Vostroknutov (2013), we identify behavioral types ex ante by observing individual willingness to follow a costly rule, and we show that assortative matching on type facilitates CPR management.

Research paper thumbnail of Merit and Justice: An Experimental Analysis of Attitude to Inequality

PLoS ONE, 2014

Merit and justice play a crucial role in ethical theory and political philosophy. Some theories v... more Merit and justice play a crucial role in ethical theory and political philosophy. Some theories view justice as allocation according to merit; others view justice as based on criteria of its own, and take merit and justice as two independent values. We study experimentally how these views are perceived. In our experiment subjects played two games (both against the computer): a game of skill and a game of luck. After each game they observed the earnings of all the subjects in the session, and thus the differences in outcomes. Each subject could reduce the winnings of one other person at a cost. The majority of the subjects used the option to subtract. The decision to subtract and the amount subtracted depended on whether the game was one of skill or luck, and on the distance between the earnings of the subject and those of others. Everything else being equal, subjects subtracted more in luck than in skill. In skill game, but not in luck, the subtraction becomes more likely, and the amount larger, as the distance increases. The results show that individuals considered favorable outcomes in luck to be undeserved, and thus felt more justified in subtracting. In the skill game instead, they considered more favorable outcomes (their own as well as others') as signal of ability and perhaps effort, which thus deserved merit; hence, they felt less motivated to subtract. However, a larger size of the unfavorable gap from the others increased the unpleasantness of poor performance, which in turn motivated larger subtraction. In conclusion, merit is attributed if and only if effort or skill significantly affect the outcome. An inequality of outcomes is viewed differently depending on whether merit causes the difference or not. Thus, merit and justice are strongly linked in the human perception of social order.

Research paper thumbnail of Norms Make Preferences Social

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

We explore a unifying explanation for prosocial behavior in which people care not about others' p... more We explore a unifying explanation for prosocial behavior in which people care not about others' payoffs per se, but whether their own behavior accords with social norms. Individuals who are sensitive to norms will adhere to them so long as they observe others doing the same. A model formalizing this generates heterogeneous prosociality without relying on explicit distributional preferences and provides clear testable predictions if norm-sensitivity is observable. We design a simple experiment that allows us to measure individual-level norm-sensitivity and we show that norm-sensitivity explains heterogeneity in prosociality in public goods, dictator, ultimatum, and trust games.

Research paper thumbnail of Rules, Rule-Following and Cooperation

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Rules are thought to persist to the extent that the direct benefits of having them (e.g. reduced ... more Rules are thought to persist to the extent that the direct benefits of having them (e.g. reduced transactions costs) exceed the costs of enforcement and of occasional misapplications. We argue that a second crucial role of rules is as screening mechanisms for identifying cooperative types. Thus we underestimate the social value of rules when we consider only their instrumental value in solving a particular problem. We demonstrate experimentally that costly rule-following can be used to screen for conditional cooperators. Subjects participate in a rule-following task in which they may incur costs to follow an arbitrary written rule in an individual choice setting. Without their knowledge, we sort them into groups according to their willingness to follow the rule. These groups then play repeated public goods or trust games. Rule-following groups sustain high public goods contributions over time, but in rule-breaking groups cooperation decays. Rulefollowers also reciprocate more in trust games. However, when individuals are not sorted by type, we observe no differences in the behavior of rule-followers and rule-breakers.

Research paper thumbnail of Causes of social reward differences encoded in human brain

Journal of Neurophysiology, 2012

Rewards may be due to skill, effort, and luck, and the social perception of inequality in rewards... more Rewards may be due to skill, effort, and luck, and the social perception of inequality in rewards among individuals may depend on what produced the inequality. Rewards due to skill produce a conflict: higher outcomes of others in this case are considered deserved, and this counters incentives to reduce inequality. However, they also signal superior skill and for this reason induce strong negative affect in those who perform less, which increases the incentive to reduce the inequality. The neurobiological mechanisms underlying evaluation of rewards due to skill, effort, and luck are still unknown. We scanned brain activity of subjects as they perceived monetary rewards caused by skill, effort, or luck. Subjects could subtract from others. Subtraction was larger, everything else being equal, in luck but increased more as the difference in outcomes grew in skill. Similarly, reward-related activation in medial orbitofrontal cortex was more sensitive to the difference in relative outcomes in skill trials. Orbitofrontal activation reflecting comparative reward advantage predicted by how much subjects reduced unfavorable reward inequality later on in the trial. Thus medial orbitofrontal cortex activity reflects the causes of reward and predicts actions that reduce inequality.

Research paper thumbnail of Experience and insight in the Race game

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2010

We study experimentally how subjects learn to plan ahead when they make sequential decisions. The... more We study experimentally how subjects learn to plan ahead when they make sequential decisions. The task is the Race game. This game is played on a finite set of m possible positions occupied by a marker, which is initially in the first position. Two players alternate ...