BEHAVIORAL GAME THEORY- DESIGN AND TESTING OF A GAME

Abstract

Earlier, cooperation among humans was considered as very mysterious behavior, but many game theoretic arguments have shown that cooperation in many cases indeed turns out to be an evolutionary stable strategy. Prisoner’s Dilemma game is used to study this. But Altruism still remains a mysterious behavior. Mainly Ultimatum game is used to study altruism. Although Zahavi has given handicap principle, which suggest that people show altruist behavior in order to gain social status. Now the fundamental question remains why people show altruism when there is no scope to gain social reputation. There is not much work done to find factor other than social status responsible for altruism. So we designed a new game called Bliss vs Pleasure to highlight factors other than social status responsible for Altruism. This game is very much realistic because the players are made to play with their own money and the money collected in the society fund of the game, as a result of their altruist behavior moves, is given to the poor and needy children rather than one of the participants in contrast to the case of ultimatum or the dictator game. Indeed the reason here to show altruism is far more realistic than other games. The reason to act selfishly in the game is equally realistic. There are two factors involved in it, first they save their money, and also get back a little fraction of many that we charged for registration and which was used for creating the society fund initially. Secondly, every time they play selfish card, their chance to win the temptation amount increases. Another important feature of this game is that it is iterative, so we are not judging a person based on his single decision. In the end we have also classified our sample into five different classes- altruist class, pseudo altruist class, indecisive class and fluctuating class based on their overall behavior in the game. We have tested that the behaviors of these classes differ from each other significantly. We have also pointed out how these classifications of people can be used to classify people in real life scenario like freedom struggle and corruption in the society.