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. 2012;7(2):e31461.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0031461. Epub 2012 Feb 21.

Economic games on the internet: the effect of $1 stakes

Ofra Amir  1 , David G Rand, Ya'akov Kobi Gal
Affiliations

Economic games on the internet: the effect of $1 stakes

Ofra Amir et al. PLoS One. 2012.

Abstract

Online labor markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) offer an unprecedented opportunity to run economic game experiments quickly and inexpensively. Using Mturk, we recruited 756 subjects and examined their behavior in four canonical economic games, with two payoff conditions each: a stakes condition, in which subjects' earnings were based on the outcome of the game (maximum earnings of $1); and a no-stakes condition, in which subjects' earnings are unaffected by the outcome of the game. Our results demonstrate that economic game experiments run on MTurk are comparable to those run in laboratory settings, even when using very low stakes.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. The effect of stakes on average behavior across games.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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