The Lazarillo's game: Sharing resources with asymmetric conditions

PLoS One. 2017 Jul 13;12(7):e0180421. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0180421. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

The Lazarillo of Tormes' picaresque novel introduces a story where two subjects sequentially extract (one, two or three) tokens from a common pool in an asymmetric information framework (the first player cannot observe her partners' actions). By introducing a reward for both subjects in case that in every period at least one subject had taken one single token, we define an interesting coordination game. We conduct an experiment with 120 undergraduate students to study their behavior in this framework. We find that if the second player is allowed to take more tokens than her partner, then the frequency of cooperators does not seem to be affected by the informational asymmetry. Nevertheless, this asymmetry (i) incentives the second player to use her 'power of extraction' while the social externality is still available, (ii) yields to more asymmetric profit distributions when subjects win the social externality and (iii) delays the breach period in case of coordination failure. Furthermore, the first choice of the first player is determinant for getting the reward.

MeSH terms

  • Choice Behavior
  • Game Theory
  • Humans
  • Reward
  • Students / psychology*

Grants and funding

Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness through the Projects ECO2012-36695, ECO2013-44483-P, ECO2015-66657 and ECO2016-75631-P, Junta de Castilla y León (SA072U16) and Junta de Andalucía (P12-SEJ-1436) is gratefully acknowledged.