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Card Games and Financial Crises

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Abstract

There may be a nexus between card games and financial markets. Akerlof and Shiller (2010) ask whether the decline in the number of bridge players and the growth in the number of poker players may have led to the current bad financial traders’ practices which are responsible for the global financial crisis. The reason is that bridge is a cooperative game generally played without monetary payoffs, while poker is an individualistic game with monetary payoffs. We simulate trust and dictator game experiments on a large sample of affiliated bridge and poker players. We find that bridge players make more polarized choices and send significantly more than poker players as trustors, a result which is reinforced when corrected for risk aversion and dictator giving. Overall, our findings do not reject the hypothesis that bridge practice is associated with a relatively higher disposition to team reasoning and strategic altruism.

Suggested Citation

  • Leonardo Becchetti & Maurizio Fiaschetti & Giancarlo Marini, 2012. "Card Games and Financial Crises," CEIS Research Paper 256, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 09 Oct 2012.
  • Handle: RePEc:rtv:ceisrp:256
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Victoria Coren: the cause of the crisis
      by chris dillow in Stumbling and Mumbling on 2012-11-20 18:22:53

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    trust games; financial crisis; poker; bridge;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values

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