@article{399bf0fea47143f5817a18726f595f27,
title = "Meaningful learning in weighted voting games: an experiment",
abstract = "By employing binary committee choice problems, this paper investigates how varying or eliminating feedback about payoffs affects: (1) subjects{\textquoteright} 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.",
keywords = "Experiment, Learning, Two-armed bandit problem, Voting game",
author = "Eric Guerci and Nobuyuki Hanaki and Naoki Watanabe",
note = "Funding Information: The authors thank Gabriele Esposito and Xiaoyan Lu for their collaboration in the early stage of this project, Yoichi Izunaga for his excellent research assistance, and Yan Chen, John Duffy, Benjamin Hermalin, Midori Hirokawa, Yoichi Hizen, Tatsuya Kameda, Maria Montero, Tatsuyoshi Saijo, Toshio Yamagishi, and Roberto Weber for their valuable comments, and Jeremy Mercer for proof-reading the manuscript. The authors acknowledge the contributions of the experimental economics laboratory at Osaka University, in particular, Keigo Inukai, Emi Kurimune, and Shigehiro Serizawa for help in conducting the experiment. A part of this work has been carried out while Hanaki was affiliated with Aix-Marseille University (Aix-Marseille School of Economics). Hanaki thanks the Aix-Marseille School of Economics for the various support it provided. Financial support from Foundation for the Fusion of Science and Technology (FOST), MEXT Grants-in-Aid 24330078 and 25380222 (Watanabe), JSPS-ANR bilateral research grant “BECOA” (ANR-11-FRJA-0002), and Joint Usage/Research Center of ISER at Osaka University are gratefully acknowledged. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.",
year = "2017",
month = jun,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1007/s11238-017-9588-x",
language = "English",
volume = "83",
pages = "131--153",
journal = "Theory and Decision",
issn = "0040-5833",
publisher = "Springer Netherlands",
number = "1",
}