They’re Only Tokens
Mr "howtolive" reports:
On Friday I had the opportunity to hear author Dan Ariely speak. Dan is an MIT professor on tour to promote his new book, Predictably Irrational. … The example Dan gave was an experiment in which people had the ability to cheat and claim they deserved more money than they actually did. When the payoff was in cash, people only cheated a little, but when the payoff was in tokens which could be immediately redeemed for cash, people cheated a lot more.
Here is a nice book summary by Toby Segaran. On his website Dan has a video which is like those ads comparing a hip Apple customer to a Windows dork, but this time comparing a hip behavioral economist to a nerdy standard economist. Completely unfair as argument, but cute nonetheless.
I do appreciate the discussion and the time people are spending on this (plus I am learning from it). here are a few general comments:
1) Sorry to disappoint anyone but my blog is mine and no one else is writing it.
2) As for the 2 games, realize that they are only meant as demonstrations and these are not the real experiments that we draw conclusions from.
3) The paper that describes the research on the door game (with proper experiments) is at:
http://www.predictablyirrat...
I am very interesting in criticism, but I would much rather have it based on the real research and not on a demonstration that is designed to be an illustration.
Yours
Dan
Props to Zubon.