Otree: Implementing Websockets to Allow for Real-Time Interactions – a Continuous Double Auction Market as First Application

Abstract

This article illustrates the implementation of websockets in oTree (Chen et al. 2016) to allow for real-time interactions. While oTree generally allows to overcome the need for participants to be at the same location to interact with each other, a real-time module in the sense that the user interface responds within milliseconds to actions from other participants is currently not available. We address this gap and further develop oTree by making real-time interactions between a large number of players with immediate updates possible. As a first application, we run a continuous double auction market on Amazon Mechanical Turk to validate its functionality. This ready-to-use software is of special interest for the research of large (online) markets and for teaching purposes. We provide the code open-source on GitHub, thereby encouraging users to develop it further and applying the websocket technology to other real-time settings.