On the robustness of behaviour in experimental 'beauty contest' games

Abstract

We report and compare results from several different versions of an experimental interactive guessing game first studied by Nagel (1995), which we refer to as the 'beauty contest' game following Keynes (1936). In these games, groups of subjects are repeatedly asked to simultaneously guess a real number in the interval [0, 100] that they believe will be closest to 1/2 times either the median, mean, or maximum of all numbers chosen. We also use our experimental data to test a simple model of adaptive learning behaviour.