Association between decisions: experiments with coupled two-person games

Abstract

Actors making public decisions about a certain policy issue in one particular arena also meet in other arenas where they will have to make decisions on other issues. By incorporating information from across coevolving arenas, actors make associations between the decisions in the different arenas. To understand the dynamics of associations, we deployed a formal game-theoretic approach and run an experiment. Subjects played two different games, each representing a different decision-making arena. The results show that history builds-up and that subjects made associations between the two games, partly explaining the behaviour of decision-makers interacting in multilevel decision-making settings.