The strategy versus the direct-response method: a first survey of experimental comparisons

By Jordi Brandts, Gary Charness. 2011

740 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we present a first survey of the literature regarding whether the strategy method, in which a responder makes conditional decisions for each possible information set, leads to different experimental results than does the more standard direct-response method, in which the responder learns the action of the first mover and then chooses a response. Of the twenty-nine existing comparisons, sixteen find no difference, while four do find differences, and nine comparisons find mixed evidence. We also find some indications about the underlying determinants of when the two methods lead to different responses. For example, it appears that levels of punishment are substantially lower with the strategy method. In addition, it also appears that difference across these elicitation methods are more likely when people make fewer contingent choices. Finally, in no case do we find that a treatment effect found with the strategy method is not observed with the direct-response method.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e888e8d45e3609996051d3e0c75dfee3ce7af440

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Citations in the corpus

Why are Economists so Different? Nature, Nurture and Gender Effects in a Simple Trust Game (2014, neutral): “(3)Brandts and Charness (2011) compare outcomes of games using the strategy and the direct response method and find that in 25 out of 29 studies surveyed there was no significant difference between the two methods.”
Temporal stability and psychological foundations of cooperation preferences (2012, background): “3 Burlando and Guala (2005) and Gächter and Thöni (2005) investigate preference stability in a setting where they regroup subjects according to their cooperation preferences.”
Other Regarding Preferences: A Selective Survey of Experimental Results (2012, methodology): “This suggests an anchoring and adjustment process in line with other examples of framing effects – when subjects are faced with a problem that has multiple dimensions, the framing can impact which dimension gets the most 23 See Brandts and Charness (2011) for a recent survey on this issue.”
More than Thirty Years of Ultimatum Bargaining Experiments: Motives, Variations, and a Survey of the Recent Literature (2013, neutral): “…“hot play” versus “cold play” – methodologically speaking, the difference between the direct response method and the strategy (vector) method in economic experiments (see also Brandts and Charness, 2011) – relied on evidence from the ultimatum game (Brosig et al., 2003; McLeish and Oxoby, 2004).”
Sustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: a selective survey of the literature (2011, background): “Brandts and Charness (2009), following up on their earlier work in Brandts and Charness (2000), analyze a number of studies that compare such direct versus indirect elicitation of responses and conclude that by and large these two types of responses are consistent more often than not.”
Trust games: A meta-analysis (2011, result): “In a recent survey of the literature Brandts and Charness (2010) posit that the strategy method does not lead to different experimental results than the standard direct-response method.”
Why do people tell the truth? Experimental evidence for pure lie aversion (2013, result): “We also note that Brandts and Charness (2011) review the experimental studies that use both methods and find no treatment differences in most of them.”
Corruption, Norm Violation and Decay in Social Capital (2016, methodology): “However, in an exhaustive metastudy comparing strategy elicitation method versus direct method, Brandts and Charness (2011) finds that there was not even one case where treatment effect was found in strategy elicitation 9 how much of their initial endowment they are willing to send to the receiver.”