Abstract
ConG is software for conducting economic experiments in continuous and discrete time. It allows experimenters with limited programming experience to create a variety of strategic environments featuring rich visual feedback in continuous time and over continuous action spaces, as well as in discrete time or over discrete action spaces. Simple, easily edited input files give the experimenter considerable flexibility in specifying the strategic environment and visual feedback. Source code is modular and allows researchers with programming skills to create novel strategic environments and displays.
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Notes
We ran the same exercise with z-Tree, and lags were an order of magnitude longer. Although an expert z-Tree programmer might be able to shorten these lags somewhat, ConG puts particular focus on rapid action experiments by providing built in low-latency interaction and highly graphical displays that allow for very fast absorption of information.
In this example subjects are playing a “population game” (each subject is matched with the average choice of some subset of other players) though a quick change in the configuration file would change this to standard pair-wise matching.
An experimenter may implement a game with non-symmetric payoffs via subject-by-subject config file assignment. In the config file, below the period-by-period game definition, rows may be used to define each subjects’ settings for each period. Non-symmetric payoffs result when different payoffs are assigned to subjects in the same matched group. For an example of subject-by-subject assignment, see the Arbitrary Grouping and Matching section of the ConG documentation website.
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Acknowledgements
This project was made possible by National Science Foundation Grant SES-0925039. We are grateful to the undergraduate programmers who contributed to this project: Joseph Allington, Pranava Adduri, Matthew Browne, Ashley Chard, Michael Cusack, Anthony Lim, Alex (Richard) Lou, Vadim Maximov, Jacob Meryett, Laker Sparks, and Sam Wolpert. Graduate researchers, including Jacopo Magnani, Luba Petersen, Jean Paul Rabanal, and undergraduate researchers Tamara Bakarian, Thomas Campbell, Cosmo Coulter, Jenelle Feole, Wade Hastings, Keith Henwood, and Richard Shall also made significant contributions. We would also like to thank Urs Fischbacher for his comments.
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Pettit, J., Friedman, D., Kephart, C. et al. Software for continuous game experiments. Exp Econ 17, 631–648 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-013-9387-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-013-9387-3