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Does informing groups of peer progress make groups succeed? : A Nudge to Group-Effort Learning (ANGEL)

As behavioural economics students, we are interested in finding an effective and practical 'nudge' to enhance individual effort in a group project. A nudge can be thought of as a guiding force, which alters the behaviour of individuals in a group. Individuals often misconceive where they stand with respect to others in the population and if you inform them, they have a tendency to adjust their natural behaviour. A Nudge to Group-Effort Learning (ANGEL) informs each individual in a group how much effort their group has put in with respect to the other groups. Our project consists of running a public goods experiment with 84 participants at Warwick University. The groups are invited to play a publics goods game, through computer simulations, in which they receive feedback on the effort of other groups. The payoff to each participant depends on how much effort the other participants are willing to put in. The dynamics of the game reflect the challenges students experience when working together in a group project. The main purpose of the project is to stimulate participation across all the individuals in a group. We plan to present our project and findings at a series of forums and conferences.

Justus Timmers & Vishal George

TimmersVishal George

Update 17/04/2013

Workshops and conferences:

  • Bucharest, ICEA 2013: workshop on Applied Behavioral Economics and Decision Theory, 6th of June. We have submitted a short paper as 'ideas to be discussed' which was highly appreciated and we were granted a special award by the internal revision committee.
  • Vigo, Sing9: Game Theory conference, 8th-10th of July. The preliminary abstract has been accepted for presentation.
  • Tel Aviv, 5th Israeli Game Theory Conference, 3rd June. Our short paper has been accepted for the poster session of the conference.