ON THE ROBUSTNESS OF BEHAVIOR IN EXPERIMENTAL BEAUTY CONTEST GAMES

We report and compare results from several different versions of an ex perimental interactive guessing game first studied by Nagel (1995), wh ich we refer to as the 'beauty contest' game following Keynes (1936). In these games, groups of subjects are repeatedly asked to simultaneou sly guess a real number in the interval [0, 100] that they believe wil l be closest to 1/2 times either the median, mean, or maximum of all n umbers chosen. We also use our experimental data to test a simple mode l of adaptive learning behaviour.