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Experienced vs. inexperienced participants in the lab: do they behave differently?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Volker Benndorf ,
Claudia Moellers  and
Hans-Theo Normann
Volker Benndorf
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 4, 60629 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Claudia Moellers
Affiliation:
Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE), Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Universitätsstr. 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany
Hans-Theo Normann*
Affiliation:
Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE), Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Universitätsstr. 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany
*
e-mail: normann@dice.hhu.de
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Abstract

We analyze whether subjects with extensive laboratory experience and first-time participants, who voluntarily registered for the experiment, differ in their behavior. Subjects play four one-shot, two-player games: a trust game, a beauty contest, an ultimatum game, a traveler’s dilemma and, in addition, we conduct a single-player lying task and elicit risk preferences. We find few significant differences. In the trust game, experienced subjects are less trustworthy and they also trust less. Furthermore, experienced subjects submit fewer non-monotonic strategies in the risk elicitation task. We find no differences whatsoever in the other decisions. Nevertheless, the minor differences observed between experienced and inexperienced subjects may be relevant because we document a potential recruitment bias: the share of inexperienced subjects may be lower in the early recruitment waves.

Keywords

DilemmaExperienced subjectsLaboratory methodsTrust game

JEL classification

C90: General C70: General C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Original Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , July 2017 , pp. 12 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2017

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40881-017-0036-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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