On the Robustness of Behaviour in Experimental "Beauty Contest" Games.

The authors report and compare results from several different versions of an experimental interactive guessing game first studied by R. Nagel (1995), which they refer to as the 'beauty contest' game following J. M. Keynes (1936). In these games, groups of subjects are repeatedly asked to simultaneously guess a real number in the interval [0, 100] that they believe will be closest to 1/2 times either the median, mean, or maximum of all numbers chosen. The authors also use their experimental data to test a simple model of adaptive learning behavior. Copyright 1997 by Royal Economic Society.