Does Information Matter? Some Experimental Evidence from a Common-Pool Resource Game

This paper analyzes the effect of the availability of information about the payoff structure on the behavior of players in a Common-Pool Resource game. Six groups of six individuals played a complete information game, while other six groups played the same game but with no information about the payoff function. It will be shown that the patterns of investment decisions in both treatments are remarkadly similar. In fact, it cannot be rejected that there is no difference in the investment decisions at the aggregate level between the two treatments. Furthermore, after arguing that the unique Nash equilibrium of the game does not organize the individual data, two individual learning models are studied: one following a marginal analysis (the Best-reply function) and one following an average analysis (the Average-reply function). However, the predictive value of such learning models is found to be poor.