re: Game theory beauty contest game: TD edition [Results are in: Page 4]

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42

I just googled this and you may be a communist.

quote:

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"It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees."

(Keynes, General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, 1936).

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Winner of the contest: gar90

He picked 25 which is the closest to the 2/3 of the mean (25.06).


Results:




Results comparison between TD and other schools/'smart' demographics:

You can see that even people that you think would be extremely rational in their thinking such as Economics PhDs and Portfolio Managers don't pick '0' as the answer. In this thread only 2 out of the 54 answers (3.7%) I recorded picked '0'




Special mention: SlowFlowPro and TigerstuckinMS for exhibiting 'rational' behavior very early on.

quote:

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SlowFlowPro:
i suppose people aren't supposed to read others' posts? if they do the results should crater down parabolically

i'm going to say 20 (2/3 of 2/3 of 50)

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quote:

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TigerstuckinMS:
If I'm taking 2/3 of the average, I clearly can't pick any number above 66 since 67 is greater than 2/3 of 100 and even if everyone picked 100, 67 can never be 2/3 of the average. So, if everyone's trying to win, they won't pick a number above 66. This means that if everyone tries to win, the highest anyone would pick would be 66, so the winner would be 2/3 of THAT, or 44, so I can't pick a number above 44. Repeat till zero.

0. Logic is fun. I'm still gonna lose because not everyone logics.

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Technically the most rational people on TD: TigerstuckinMS and Huey Lewis

The most 'rational' people in this thread were the ones that chose '0' for the reasons that TigerstuckinMS explained above. However in real life SlowFlowPro is probably more rational because he recognized that not everyone will choose 0, even though that is the right answer.


Moral of the story: If you think people around you behave rationally all the time (stock markets, etc.), think again.

i almost made a comment about going down the rabbit hole down to 0 when y'all started picking it

i play to win, not earn (theoretical) brownie points

67

FWIW, the correct answer is not zero - it depends on the number of responses.

If you get a large number of rational players the answer will converge to zero but there probably aren't enough people here who will post something. Plus *somebody* will post a nonzero guess early on until they figure it out.

I see this contest is already over but for the record I probably would have picked 30 since no money is at stake and you'll have the occasional joker who will say 100. If money were at stake I'd have gone with 5 with a sample size this small.

Cool thread!