Dawid Ners,

University of Gdańsk,
Gdańsk, Poland,
E-mail: dawid.ners@gmail.com

Coalitional Games, Excessive Competition and a Lack of Trust: an Experimental ApProach

Abstract. The article tackles the issues of the effectiveness and rationality of making choices in the conditions of competition and cooperation. It confronts the economic theory of rational choice with the empirical results from an experiment. The aim of the article is to show that excessive competition and a lack of trust cause limitation of rational choice in coalitional games.
In the experiment conducted for this study purposes, a public good was used to construct a situation in which making a huge coalition is the winning strategy. Despite this fact, the research proves that under competition supported by uncertainty, which results from the lack of trust, the decision making entities behave far less rationally than the game theory would suggest. People competing with each other often take decisions irrationally.

Received: December, 2016

1st Revision: March, 2017

Accepted: June, 2017

DOI: 10.14254/2071- 789X.2017/10-2/17

JEL Classification: C71, C92, D71, D81

Keywords: coalitional games, experimental economics, first price auction, club goods, excessive competition.