As large-scale web-based experiments become increasingly feasible, concerns have arisen regarding the reproducibility and external validity of their results. Small-scale laboratory experiments, which allow for more precise control over various attributes of participants, can complement the findings of large-scale web-based experiments and contribute to rigorously examining human behavior without bias. Specifically, this study investigates the impact of cognitive ability in simple decision-making contexts such as the Dictator and the Ultimatum Game. We find that in some situations there is no difference in the behavior of the participants regardless of the difference in Raven’s score, in other situations the different score produces different behavior. These results suggest that we should control the cognitive ability of the participants according to the situations.

This study examines the potential of large language models (LLMs) to substitute for human respondents in survey research. Surveys serve as essential tools in fields like social science, marketing, and policy-making; however, traditional methods often require considerable time and costs. LLMs present a promising alternative to mitigate these burdens, though their reliability—particularly outside of U.S. contexts—remains uncertain. This study focuses on surveys conducted in Japan, comparing the responses generated by LLMs to those of actual Japanese participants. Our analysis reveals notable discrepancies due to inherent biases in LLMs, though adjusting the models to better align with specific personas can partially enhance the accuracy of simulated responses. We emphasize the need for further research to fully understand the capabilities and limitations of LLMs, aiming to refine their application in diverse areas such as social sciences, marketing, and policy decision-making.

It is necessary to extract some patterns of human behavior from events observed in subject experiments in order to choose particular parameters for computer experiments on trades of information. Many experimental sites are, however, faced with practical problems due to their small subject pools. In conducting a subject experiment at multiple sites for avoiding those problems, homogeneity of subjects’ behavior is important for integrating the data collected at separate sites. Ideally, preliminary test results on the homogeneity are needed in planning the experiment. This paper clarifies a condition under which subjects’ behavior in a bandit experiment with the context of weighted voting can be homogenized across different subject pools in five universities in Japan by covariate adjustment with their cognitive ability scores on Raven’s APM test. Among experimental sites located in different regions, we could not obtain homogeneity of subjects’ behavior by covariate adjustment with their cognitive ability scores in addition to their attribute information, although it was not difficult to obtain the homogeneity across the experimental sites located in the same region.

In a simple model of the market for transactions of data proposed by [9], this note examines the effects of budget constraints on the prices of data and the gains from trades of data produced with their constituent variables in a subject experiment. In the model, the prices of variables are exogenously set at the initial round, and then updated for the next round immediately according to the demand for the data traded in the current round. Data are traded freely among agents and the prices are determined through transactions among agents. Resale of data is permitted among agents. The initial prices of variables are computed assuming the results of sequential trades of data. Each subject was faced with budget constraints, but surplus budgets cannot be carried over to subsequent rounds. In the subject experiment, the prices of variables fluctuated, but the prices of data determined by the initial owners under budget constraints remained relatively stable without a drastic increase compared with the prices of data determined under no budget constraints. The efficiency rates in transactions made under budget constraints were not lower than those in transactions made under no budget constraints.

This note presents two remarks about the specifications of the subject experiment designed and conducted by [4] regarding the problem of assigning students to schools as a large-scale data processing problem. We compared the efficiency of assignments under two mechanisms the Boston mechanism (Bos) and the deferred acceptance mechanism (DA). First, we first conducted a subject experiment in which subjects were categorized into two groups according to their scores of the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) test, which measures cognitive ability. Subjects needed to compute their priority orders for schools from a queue of numbers. Next, we input the behavioral data observed in the early rounds of the subject experiment to the subjects’ submission of their preferences for schools and generated assignments under the Bos and the DA in order to create a virtual situation where subjects believed that the priority orders were actually unchanged, although those orders had been changed. Our main observations are as follows. (1) We should control the subjects’ cognitive ability scores and the mixtures of subjects with those scores in the experimental sessions in order to obtain the same result as the one observed by [4]. (2) Subjects might not compute the priority orders of students for schools exactly. Future research should further examine the conditions necessary to reproduce the experimental results of [4], based on the remarks clarified in this note,

This note presents a simple model of pricing data and their constituent variables traded in two-sided markets, where resale of data is allowed. The prices of those variables are exogenously set at the initial round, and in each round those prices are updated for the next round immediately at the end of the round, based on the outcomes of data transactions. If traders behave in accordance with the backward induction, then the initial prices never move in any rounds. In the subject experiment, this property was not observed but the average prices of those variables were not far from the initial values. We also examined whether information provision of the gross profits the user and non-user receive from data transactions affects the social welfare measured by the amounts of producer surplus.

In a two-armed bandit experiment with the contextual information on weighted voting, we investigated whether subjects who had experienced a binary choice problem for many periods increased the number of choosing the answer which would give a higher expected payoff when they were faced with a similar but different binary choice problem in the subsequent periods (or meaningfully learned the correct answer). Receiving both cumulative payoff and current payoffs as the feedback information, subjects learned the correct answers of three binary choice problems we examined, but for any binary choice problem they did not meaningfully learn it from their experience in a similar but different one. Compared with the previous study where subjects received only current payoffs as the feedback information, the additional feedback information on cumulative payoff might induce subjects to learn the correct answers but would not promote their meaningful learning of the latent feature of the contextual information in this experiment.