Meaningful learning in weighted voting games: an experiment

By employing binary committee choice problems, this paper investigates how varying or eliminating feedback about payoffs affects: (1) subjects’ learning about the underlying relationship between their nominal voting weights and their expected payoffs in weighted voting games; (2) the transfer of acquired learning from one committee choice problem to a similar but different problem. In the experiment, subjects choose to join one of two committees (weighted voting games) and obtain a payoff stochastically determined by a voting theory. We found that: (i) subjects learned to choose the committee that generates a higher expected payoff even without feedback about the payoffs they received; (ii) there was statistically significant evidence of “meaningful learning” (transfer of learning) only for the treatment with no payoff-related feedback. This finding calls for re-thinking existing models of learning to incorporate some type of introspection.