Guessing Games and People Behaviours: What Can We Learn?

In the last decade a growing effort has been devoted to explore the p-beauty contest game (Camerer, Ho and Weigelt, 1998; Duffy and Nagel, 1997; Nagel, 1995; Weber, 2003). The game itself is well known and extremely simple: players are asked to choose a number from a closed interval. The winning player will be the one that gets closer to a target number G. Such target is defined as the average of all guesses plus a constant, multiplied by a real number known to all players. Formally, we can write the target as: $G = p \left( {1\over n}{\sum \limits_{i = 1}^n}{g_i + d} \right)$. In its simplest form the game parameterisation is set as follows: 0 ≤ p < 1, n is the number of players in the contest, ${g_i} \in \lbrack 0, 100 \rbrack \subset \bf{R}$ is subject i’s guess and d is a constant set equal to 0.