Specific Research Objectives

The experiment’s purpose was to create a decision-making domain related to a VUCA domain—where agents had to solve a complex problem—and to analyze how their behavior changed when provided different global information.

General Research Objectives

In order to formulate specific research objectives, this chapter condenses insights from the theoretical background, deriving key objectives that are to be analyzed empirically. Following the “Engaged Scholarship Diamond Model”, designed to close the theory-practice gap, the four domains “Theory Building”, “Problem Formulation”, “Problem Solving” and “Research Design” are to be fulfilled in any preferred order by the researcher. This thesis’ conclusion serves as “Problem Solving” and will bridge real world problems (“Reality”) and empirical results from empirical research (“Solution”).

Theoretical Background

Imagine being born and raised on the Hawaiian island Kaua’i, close to the shield volcano Wai’ale’ale. On this island, yearly rainfall reaches 15 meters and more. You were stuck in this small region on this remote island your entire life, without any information ever having reached you to indicate that this extreme amount of rainfall was extra ordinary.

Introduction

According to the 2019 World Trade Report, service trades are likely to increase their share of global trade by 50 percent until 2040. Services will benefit most likely from increasing the automatization and digitalization of former face-to-face processes, and from an increasing demand of online services due to demographic change. The WTO states that global cooperation has to be increased such that all economies can collectively benefit from increasing service trade.

Empirical Research Design

The experiment consisted of three parts: the login-stage, the experiment and an after-survey. The experiment starts with 6 single-player Tower of Hanoi games to enable learning and to induce routine, referred to as “individual decision-making expertise in routine-strategy”. The single-player rounds are followed by 6 three-player Tower of Hanoi games, where the first three multiplayer-games can be solved perfectly by the agents when sticking to the single player strategy.

Results

An attempt to conduct an experiment with 330 US-American MTurks failed due to server memory capacity with the Amazon AWS “t2.micro 1 GiB”. After upgrading the server to 32 GiB of working memory with the Amazon AWS “t2.2xlarge 32 GiB”, an experiment with 180 US-American MTurks was conducted, from which data of 87 participants was used.

Conclusion

The aim of this thesis was to create a decision-making domain, in which multiple agents would collectively engage a problem, without being able to communicate with each other. Furthermore, the group decision making was structured such that each agent would always have an influence over the outcome, but could not control the impact of their decisions. Different information conditions simulated information asymmetries, from which potential behavioral changes were to be analyzed.

Discussion

ZusammenfassungThis chapter discusses the empirical results, adds additional results, and compares derived insights to other scientific conclusions from the domain of behavioral economics. The first subchapter sums up understandings of agent behavior by the results of the various hypotheses, and includes further results from statistical analyses.