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Game theory experiments

Game-theoretic experiments — interactive economic games embedded in the survey — are the standard tool of experimental economics for studying cooperation, coordination, trust and pro-social behaviour under controlled strategic incentives. Respondents play the game in real time against other respondents (or against the platform), make decisions that affect their payoffs and those of others, and the resulting choice data identifies how preferences over outcomes are shaped by social context.

tickStat is a survey and experiment platform built by academic researchers, for academic researchers. Game-theoretic experiments are a first-class methodology: respondents are synchronised in real time, rounds and periods are tracked, and payoffs are computed at the end of each session. The Weakest-Value (Minimum Effort) Coordination Game is exposed out of the box; Trust, Dictator and Public Goods variants run on the same engine and can be activated for specific projects.

Why tickStat for game theory experiments

  • Real-time synchronisation that works at scale. Most academic game-theory tools require lab-controlled, in-person sessions. tickStat runs the same games over the open web with the same synchronisation guarantees, so you can recruit from a panel and run a multi-period game without bringing participants into a physical lab.

  • Out-of-the-box coordination, trust, dictator and public-goods games. The four canonical games of experimental economics are pre-configured. Parameterise the payoff matrix, group size and number of periods; the platform handles the rest. New variants can be activated on request without rebuilding the engine.

  • Round and period tracking. Multi-period games — the standard format for studying repeated-game cooperation, learning and reputation effects — are first-class. The platform records every period's decisions and computes accumulated payoffs across rounds.

  • Payoff computation and reporting. End-of-session payoffs are computed by the platform from the recorded decisions; respondents see their final amount and the data exports per-period decisions ready for behavioural-economics analysis in R, Stata or SPSS.

  • Reproducible by design. Game type, payoff matrix, group size, period count, matching rule — every setting is stored with the survey definition. Replicating the experiment with a different population means re-running the same definition, not re-implementing the game logic from scratch.

  • Multilingual fielding. Run the same game across countries and languages with a single survey definition.

  • GDPR and EU AI Act compliant. Important for academic researchers running publication-grade studies under the current regulatory regime.

What's on this page

Below: how to configure the game type, payoff matrix, group size and period count; how the real-time interaction works for respondents; and what data the platform exports for behavioural-economics analysis.

If you are new to the platform, start with the Getting started guide.

Game-theoretic experiments embed an interactive economic game inside a survey. Respondents make decisions with real (or hypothetical) monetary consequences, and the researcher observes how individuals behave under controlled strategic incentives. Game-theoretic experiments are a core method in experimental economics, behavioural science, environmental and resource economics, and any field that studies cooperation, trust, risk-taking, fairness or coordination.

tickStat implements interactive games on top of a real-time engine that synchronises respondents in the same session via WebSockets, tracks rounds and periods, and computes payoffs at the end of the game.

When to use it

Use a game-theoretic experiment when you want to observe behaviour rather than self-reported attitudes — that is, when the research question is "what would a person do in this strategic situation" rather than "what do they say they would do". Typical applications include:

  • Cooperation and free-riding in environmental governance and common-pool resource management.
  • Trust, reciprocity and reputation in transactions and institutions.
  • Coordination problems where the social outcome depends on players matching their effort.
  • Pro-social behaviour, fairness norms, inequality aversion.

Supported game

The platform currently exposes the Weakest-Value (Minimum Effort) Coordination Game as a standard question type. In this game — based on the classic minimum-effort coordination paradigm — each player selects an effort level from 1 to N. The payoff for every player in the group depends on the minimum effort chosen across the group, minus a private cost proportional to that player's own effort. The game has multiple Pareto-ranked Nash equilibria, which makes it a natural laboratory for studying coordination failure, strategic uncertainty and the dynamics of effort under repeated interaction.

Additional game types — Trust Game, Dictator Game, Public Goods Game — are implemented on the same engine and can be activated for a research project on request.

How it works in tickStat

Configuration options for a game-theoretic question include:

  • Effort levels (1..N) and the payoff matrix — the per-effort cost and the group payoff function.
  • Number of rounds the game is played.
  • Maximum number of concurrent sessions — caps how many independent groups play in parallel.
  • Target number of completed sessions — the data-collection goal for the experiment.
  • Initial information screen — instructions explaining the game, the payoff structure and a worked example.

At runtime, respondents are assembled into game sessions and synchronised in real time. Each round, the engine collects every player's decision, computes the round payoff according to the game rules, and broadcasts the updated state back to all players.

Captured data

For every play, tickStat records:

  • The session identifier and the round/period number.
  • The decision made by each player.
  • The realised payoff for that round.
  • The cumulative payoff at the end of the game (used to determine the final monetary incentive, when applicable).

Data exports in the standard SPSS-format report at the player–round level, which is the natural unit of analysis for panel-style estimation of learning, convergence and treatment effects.

Practical tips

  • Run a soft launch with a small number of sessions to verify that respondents understand the payoff structure before opening the game to the full sample.
  • For coordination games, group size matters — larger groups make convergence to the efficient equilibrium harder. Pre-register your group size as a design parameter.
  • If your design requires real monetary incentives, configure the payoff scale so that the expected payment is consistent with your panel provider's per-respondent budget.