Financial Game Template

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Overview

The Financial Game template can be used to create a multiplayer game that requires multiple choices and a payoff matrix to award/punish participants according to the choices they made.

Here is an example of the user interface.

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Variables

The Financial Game is a customizable template with many existing variables. In order to create an original game by using the template, you should set the following existing parameters:

Prev_Rnd_Choice If it is set to 1, previous round choice of participant will be displayed in the next round. Total_Payoff If it is set to 1, total payoff amount of participant will be displayed during the experiment. Avg_Payoff If it is set to 1, average payoff amount of participant will be displayed during the experiment. No_of_Rnds A variable to hold the total number of rounds that the experiment will last. Duration_of_Rnds A variable to hold the duration of each rounds in seconds. Duration_btw_Rnds A variable to hold the duration in seconds between two consecutive rounds. Score_Window If it is set to 1, a score window at the end of game will be displayed to display all total payoffs. Choice_Ratio if it is set to 1, ratio of participants' choices until that round will be displayed during the game. Choice i Text Caption of i'th choice button (e.g. if you have 2 choices for your experiment first 2 choice captions must be completed). Enable Polling If it is set to 1, polling is activated for the experiment (e.g. if the minimum number of necessary participants for the experiment is 2, maximum number of necessary participants is 4 and polling is enabled, at each round 2 of those 4 participants will be selected randomly to play the game).

Remaining parameters for this template are used to modify text labels within the experiment to inform participant about the experiment's details/status and they don't have direct effect on experiment's logic. If these parameters are not completed, the default parameters that are already defined within the experiment application will be used.

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Payoff Matrix

The Financial Game template makes use of a payoff matrix that is already defined within the template. In order to run a custom experiment that makes use of this template, you should modify the matrix appropriately. An example modification for Three Cows game is provided in the figure below.

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For this 3-player game example, there are two choices within the game. Therefore our payoff matrix has 2 rows. The first row stands for the payoff values if this particular user chooses 'Choice 1' which is 'Bring to Commons' (c). Similarly the second row stands for the payoff values if this particular user chooses 'Choice 2' which is 'Barn Feed' (b) for this example. Since it is a 3-player game and there are 2 choices in the game, the number of necessary columns for the payoff matrix is 2^3/2=2^2. While entering the column values one should assume regular permutation of choices where the permutation starts from rightmost choice and the leftmost choice changes finally.

Some example permutations:

For a 2-player game with choices a, b and c, column values refer to a; b; c.
For a 3-player game with choices a, b and c, column values refer to a, a; a, b; a, c; b, a; b, b; b, c; c, a; c, b; c, c.

Adding New Variables/Matrices

Adding new variables or matrices to the experiment is not currently supported by this experiment template since adding new variable requires modification of flash project as well as modifying the financialgametemplate.html file.