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Robin Hanson's avatar

Jason, good point about variance and the prize incentives.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Further to Hal's point, might the increased variance of group prediction simply be due to risk preferences inadvertently created by the experiment's design? The groups are competing against 11 other deliberative groups while the individuals are competing against only 3 other traders. If it's something like a winner-take-all contest, wouldn't we expect more variance where there are more competing units?

Now if the increased variance of the deliberative groups was instead caused by internally unequal endowments of aggression and persuasive skills, while the traders' budgets were equal, isn't it the case that most markets feature (wildly) unequal trading budgets along with non-independent, feedback trading? If I remember correctly, your experiment assumed equal trading budgets and no feedback trading.

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