The seminar is canceled due to an illness in Professor Kagel's family. We will reschedule the seminar in the Winter term.

We report results from a series of experiments looking at learning in signaling games – a wide class of games ranging from Spence’s educational model to industrial organization applications such as in entry limit pricing. The focus of the research is on learning to play strategically as Individuals playing the game in the standard (for economics) generic context only learn to play strategically very slowly and at best exhibit weak or non-existent cross-game learning. In contrast, experiments with the same game in two person teams show much more rapid learning, meeting, and even beating, the demanding “truth wins” norm for team play in more difficult games. We also show how the use of meaningful context can at times promote positive significant cross-game learning for individuals in some cases while retarding learning in other cases (while having no impact on team play in this case). Surprisingly, advice achieves much the same results as teams for both advisee and advisors, where the latter have only their own voices to listen to. We relate our results to the psychology literature on team play and cross-game learning.

Joint work with David Cooper.

Background papers:

"Are Two Heads Better than One? Team versus Individual Play in Signaling Games", with David J. Cooper, American Economic Review, June 2005

"The Role of Context and Team Play in Cross-Game Learning" Journal of the European Economic Association (in press) with David Cooper.