IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jeborg/v161y2019icp145-157.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Interactive Ellsberg tasks: An experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Dominiak, Adam
  • Duersch, Peter

Abstract

In his Ph.D.-thesis, Ellsberg formulated strong conditions under which his hypothetical tests of SEU theory have to take place – there should be no strategic interaction. Yet, in reality, situations with unknown probabilities often feature strategic interests of others, who may influence the unknown probabilities. Will decision makers see such situations as interactive or not? We construct experimental treatments where subjects make decisions under ambiguity, while also facing strategic motives of others. Payoffs form coordination or zero-sum games. At least a quarter of subjects view the situation as interactive; others behave in line with the predictions of ambiguity models.

Suggested Citation

  • Dominiak, Adam & Duersch, Peter, 2019. "Interactive Ellsberg tasks: An experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 161(C), pages 145-157.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:161:y:2019:i:c:p:145-157
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2019.03.005
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268119300666
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jebo.2019.03.005?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Cerreia-Vioglio, S. & Maccheroni, F. & Marinacci, M. & Montrucchio, L., 2011. "Uncertainty averse preferences," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 146(4), pages 1275-1330, July.
    2. Alex Voorhoeve & Ken Binmore & Arnaldur Stefansson & Lisa Stewart, 2016. "Ambiguity attitudes, framing, and consistency," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 81(3), pages 313-337, September.
    3. Dow James & Werlang Sergio Ribeiro Da Costa, 1994. "Nash Equilibrium under Knightian Uncertainty: Breaking Down Backward Induction," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 305-324, December.
    4. Ghirardato, Paolo & Maccheroni, Fabio & Marinacci, Massimo, 2004. "Differentiating ambiguity and ambiguity attitude," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 118(2), pages 133-173, October.
    5. Camerer, Colin & Weber, Martin, 1992. "Recent Developments in Modeling Preferences: Uncertainty and Ambiguity," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 5(4), pages 325-370, October.
    6. Zeckhauser Richard, 2006. "Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable," Capitalism and Society, De Gruyter, vol. 1(2), pages 1-41, September.
    7. ,, 2016. "Objective rationality and uncertainty averse preferences," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 11(2), May.
    8. Chen, Daniel L. & Schonger, Martin, 2016. "Is Ambiguity Aversion a Preference?," TSE Working Papers 16-703, Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), revised Feb 2020.
    9. Duersch, Peter & Römer, Daniel & Roth, Benjamin, 2017. "Intertemporal stability of uncertainty preferences," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 60(C), pages 7-20.
    10. Fox, Craig R. & Weber, Martin, 2002. "Ambiguity Aversion, Comparative Ignorance, and Decision Context," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 88(1), pages 476-498, May.
    11. Gilboa, Itzhak & Schmeidler, David, 1989. "Maxmin expected utility with non-unique prior," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 141-153, April.
    12. Machina, Mark J & Schmeidler, David, 1992. "A More Robust Definition of Subjective Probability," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 60(4), pages 745-780, July.
    13. Lo, Kin Chung, 1996. "Equilibrium in Beliefs under Uncertainty," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 71(2), pages 443-484, November.
    14. Füllbrunn, Sascha & Rau, Holger A. & Weitzel, Utz, 2014. "Does ambiguity aversion survive in experimental asset markets?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 107(PB), pages 810-826.
    15. Voorhoeve, Alex & Binmore, Ken G & Stefansson, Arnaldur & Stewart, Lisa, 2016. "Ambiguity attitudes, framing, and consistency," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 65577, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    16. Daniel Ellsberg, 1961. "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 75(4), pages 643-669.
    17. Ken Binmore & Lisa Stewart & Alex Voorhoeve, 2012. "How much ambiguity aversion?," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 45(3), pages 215-238, December.
    18. Stephen Morris, 1997. "Risk, uncertainty and hidden information," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 42(3), pages 235-269, May.
    19. Greiner, Ben, 2004. "An Online Recruitment System for Economic Experiments," MPRA Paper 13513, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Eichberger, Jurgen & Kelsey, David, 2000. "Non-Additive Beliefs and Strategic Equilibria," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 183-215, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Masaki Aoyagi & Takehito Masuda & Naoko Nishimura, 2021. "Strategic Uncertainty and Probabilistic Sophistication," ISER Discussion Paper 1117, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University.
    2. Li, Chen & Turmunkh, Uyanga & Wakker, Peter P., 2020. "Social and strategic ambiguity versus betrayal aversion," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 272-287.
    3. Richard J. Arend, 2020. "Strategic decision-making under ambiguity: a new problem space and a proposed optimization approach," Business Research, Springer;German Academic Association for Business Research, vol. 13(3), pages 1231-1251, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Karni, Edi & Maccheroni, Fabio & Marinacci, Massimo, 2015. "Ambiguity and Nonexpected Utility," Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications,, Elsevier.
    2. Aurélien Baillon & Yoram Halevy & Chen Li, 2022. "Experimental elicitation of ambiguity attitude using the random incentive system," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 25(3), pages 1002-1023, June.
    3. Lang, Matthias & Wambach, Achim, 2013. "The fog of fraud – Mitigating fraud by strategic ambiguity," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 255-275.
    4. Andrew J. Keith & Darryl K. Ahner, 2021. "A survey of decision making and optimization under uncertainty," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 300(2), pages 319-353, May.
    5. Robin Cubitt & Gijs Kuilen & Sujoy Mukerji, 2018. "The strength of sensitivity to ambiguity," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 85(3), pages 275-302, October.
    6. Eichberger, Jürgen & Kelsey, David, 2007. "Ambiguity," Sonderforschungsbereich 504 Publications 07-50, Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Universität Mannheim;Sonderforschungsbereich 504, University of Mannheim.
      • Eichberger, Jürgen & Kelsey, David, 2007. "Ambiguity," Papers 07-50, Sonderforschungsbreich 504.
    7. Dominiak, Adam & Duersch, Peter, 2015. "Benevolent and Malevolent Ellsberg Games," Working Papers 0592, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    8. Kauffeldt, T. Florian, 2016. "Strategic behavior of non-expected utility players in games with payoff uncertainty," Working Papers 0614, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    9. Adam Dominiak & Jean-Philippe Lefort, 2021. "Ambiguity and Probabilistic Information," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(7), pages 4310-4326, July.
    10. Dominiak, Adam & Duersch, Peter & Lefort, Jean-Philippe, 2012. "A dynamic Ellsberg urn experiment," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 75(2), pages 625-638.
    11. Lo, Kin Chung, 2009. "Correlated Nash equilibrium," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(2), pages 722-743, March.
    12. Jürgen Eichberger & David Kelsey, 2011. "Are the treasures of game theory ambiguous?," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 48(2), pages 313-339, October.
    13. Lo, Kin Chung, 1999. "Extensive Form Games with Uncertainty Averse Players," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 28(2), pages 256-270, August.
    14. Bade, Sophie, 2011. "Ambiguous act equilibria," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 71(2), pages 246-260, March.
    15. Marco Rojas & Damián Vergara, 2021. "Ambiguity and long-run cooperation in strategic games," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 73(3), pages 1077-1098.
    16. Christoph Bühren & Fabian Meier & Marco Pleßner, 2023. "Ambiguity aversion: bibliometric analysis and literature review of the last 60 years," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 73(2), pages 495-525, June.
    17. Füllbrunn, Sascha & Rau, Holger A. & Weitzel, Utz, 2014. "Does ambiguity aversion survive in experimental asset markets?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 107(PB), pages 810-826.
    18. Lo, Kin Chung, 2002. "Correlated equilibrium under uncertainty," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 44(2), pages 183-209, November.
    19. Gumen, Anna & Savochkin, Andrei, 2013. "Dynamically stable preferences," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 148(4), pages 1487-1508.
    20. repec:awi:wpaper:0448 is not listed on IDEAS
    21. Patrick Schmidt, 2019. "Eliciting ambiguity with mixing bets," Papers 1902.07447, arXiv.org, revised Aug 2024.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Ambiguity; Ellsberg task; Ambiguity aversion; Ellsberg conditions; Nash equilibrium;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:161:y:2019:i:c:p:145-157. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jebo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.