Does Information Make any Difference? Some Experimental Evidence from a Common-Pool Resource Game

Abstract

"The effects on behavior of two different levels of information about the payoff structure are analyzed in a fifty period Common-Pool Resource game of six players with no communication. Six groups of six players played a complete information game while other six groups played the same game but without knowledge of the payoff functions. Players in the incomplete information treatment only had some qualitative information about the interdependent character of the decision situation. It will be shown that the aggregated decision patterns are remarkably similar in both treatments. After arguing that this is of special importance to the literature on learning models, three such models are contrasted with the data. It will be concluded that the predictions of a simple extension of a learning model based on average payoffs cannot be rejected to be equal to the observed data."