The Online Coalition Game: A tool for online interactive coalition formation research

Abstract

In this paper, we present the Online Coalition Game (OCG): an open-source tool written for the open-access research platform oTree that enables high-powered interactive coalition formation experiments. Besides containing a tutorial on conducting and configuring studies using the OCG, we discuss two previous implementations. With these examples, we demonstrate that online use of the OCG provides the benefits of large sample sizes and fast data collection, while leading to convergent and robust findings. Moreover, we show that small changes in the experimental setup offer interesting opportunities to expand coalition formation theory by including insights from, amongst others, literature on bargaining, ostracism, and communication, and vice versa.