Experimental Method

Abstract

Twenty subjects participated in the experiment of whom 18 were graduate students, one a postdoctoral fellow, and one an advanced undergraduate research assistant. Thirteen of the 18 graduate students were in the quantitative psychology program and five were in the social psychology program of the Department of Psychology of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All of the graduate students were enrolled in an elective graduate seminar on n-person game theory taught by Amnon Rapoport; seven were in the class during the spring semester, 1971, seven during the spring semester, 1973, and four during the fall semester, 1975, The postdoctoral fellow audited the 1971 class, in which he participated fully except for examinations. The undergraduate student who participated in the 1973 session had been Rapoport’s research assistant for two years; in particular he had conducted several experiments involving hundreds of n-person games (but not ones in the present experiment), and had, through assistance with data analyses, become familiar with the theoretical models and experimental results of n-person cooperative games with sidepayments.