Man has developed rules of conduct not because he knows but because he does not know what all the consequences of a particular action will be.
–F.A. Hayek
As a summer scholar in the IFREE-Sponsored Summer Scholar Program, Bradley Sherwood worked on research with Summer Scholar mentors, Drs. Bart Wilson and Jan Osborn of Chapman University. This led to the publication entitled, “Conduct in narrativized trust games,” published in the Southern Economic Journal, where the above quote is found in the abstract.
Read an excerpt from the abstract:
“We “narrativize” a basic extensive form trust game by placing participants in a story that contextualizes the interaction with an unforeseeable future. In our narrative experiment, participants consider each decision as a character, advancing the story with their choices for salient payoffs. Our interest is in understanding how participants apply Adam Smith’s rules of beneficent and just conduct in our narrativized games with epistemic conditions of an unknown future, conditions which aren’t possible in extensive form. We invite our readers to participate in the story of the results, making meaning as participants in a narrative that unfolds with their choices.”
Continue reading the paper online.
For more information about the Summer Scholar Program, please visit the Economic Science Institute’s webpage and the IFREE-Sponsored Summer Scholars Program webpage.