Round Of Play Research Articles

Home advantage in matches of the top Polish men’s handball league in the seasons before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract Study aim: The aim of the study was to determine whether there are differences in performance analysis in high-sport handball matches between Pre-COVID-19, during COVID-19, and Post-COVID-19 seasons in the home and away matches. Material and methods: The study material was obtained from the official match statistics of male PGNiG Superleague Ltd. (493 matches). The study included the 2019/2020 (before), 2020/2021 (during), and the 2021/2022 (after) season. Statistical tests were used: the Mann-Whitney U test and the Kruskal-Wallis test. Results: The COVID-19 pandemic period affected the reduction of home advantage during handball matches. The venue was a differentiating factor in selected handball team activities in the Pre-COVID-19 season, while there were no differences between home and away matches in the COVID-19 and Post-COVID-19 seasons. The away matches in the Pre-COVID-19 season were characterized by more throws from 9m and lower goals and throws from 6m than in the Post-COVID-19 season, indicating recent trends in handball play. Conclusion: The home advantage associated with playing home matches in terms of the Pre-COVID-19 season and between seasons occurs mainly in the first round of play. Further studies focusing on performance analysis in handball depending on the outcome of the match (win, lose) and the venue (home, away) should be conducted.

Creating a Domain of Losses in the Laboratory: Effects of Endowment Size

This study examines the effects of initial endowment size on individual behavior in a binary choice game with no dominant strategy. Subjects make decisions in two, theoretically identical sequences, differing in initial endowment levels only. Each decision involves a choice between an option with a certain loss and an option with a loss that is increasing in the number of individuals who choose it. For the higher endowment level, all subjects are guaranteed a positive payoff. For the lower endowment level, subjects who choose the uncertain loss option could receive a negative payoff. The results indicate that in the first round of play, subjects with the higher endowment level choose the certain loss option significantly more often than subjects with the lower endowment level. There are, however, no significant differences in behavior beyond the first few rounds of play.

The Formation of Social Conventions in Real-Time Environments.

Why are some behaviors governed by strong social conventions while others are not? We experimentally investigate two factors contributing to the formation of conventions in a game of impure coordination: the continuity of interaction within each round of play (simultaneous vs. real-time) and the stakes of the interaction (high vs. low differences between payoffs). To maximize efficiency and fairness in this game, players must coordinate on one of two equally advantageous equilibria. In agreement with other studies manipulating continuity of interaction, we find that players who were allowed to interact continuously within rounds achieved outcomes with greater efficiency and fairness than players who were forced to make simultaneous decisions. However, the stability of equilibria in the real-time condition varied systematically and dramatically with stakes: players converged on more stable patterns of behavior when stakes are high. To account for this result, we present a novel analysis of the dynamics of continuous interaction and signaling within rounds. We discuss this previously unconsidered interaction between within-trial and across-trial dynamics as a form of social canalization. When stakes are low in a real-time environment, players can satisfactorily coordinate ‘on the fly’, but when stakes are high there is increased pressure to establish and adhere to shared expectations that persist across rounds.

Game—The Hotel Game: Pricing Simulations with Opaque and Transparent Channels

We present a pricing simulation game designed to facilitate the delivery of economics knowledge through a team-based and hands-on learning experience. The game provides insights into the relationship between selling channels, market structure, and optimal pricing. Players take the role of hotel managers in charge of the pricing strategies for the transparent and “opaque” selling channels in both the peak and off-peak seasons. The game can be played in class or remotely, and its design allows instructors to tailor each game to their particular teaching needs. They can adjust the parameter values associated with demand uncertainty, product differentiation, hotels’ cost structure, number of hotels, and asymmetries among hotels. In addition, the game allows for repeated interaction, and the instructor can specify the amount of information about competitors that becomes public to players after each round of play. Teaching Note: Interested Instructors please see the Instructor Materials page for access to the restricted materials. To maintain the integrity and usefulness of cases published in ITE, unapproved distribution of the case teaching notes and other restricted materials to any other party is prohibited.

Optimal Exploration-Exploitation in a Multi-Armed-Bandit Problem with Non-Stationary Rewards

In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem a gambler needs to choose at each round of play one of K arms, each characterized by an unknown reward distribution. Reward realizations are only observed when an arm is selected, and the gambler's objective is to maximize cumulative expected earnings over some planning horizon of length T. To do this, the gambler needs to acquire information about arms (exploration) while simultaneously optimizing immediate rewards (exploitation). The gambler's policy is measured relative to a (static) oracle that knows the identity of the best arm a priori. The gap in performance between the former and latter is often referred to as the regret, and the main question is how small the regret can be as a function of problem primitives (hardness of the problem, typically measured as the distinguishability of the best arm) and the game horizon (T). This problem has been studied extensively when the reward distributions do not change over time. The uncertainty in this set up is purely spatial and essentially amounts to identifying the optimal arm. We complement this literature by developing a flexible nonparametric model for temporal uncertainty in the rewards. The extent of temporal uncertainty is measured via the cumulative mean change of the rewards over the horizon, a metric we refer to as temporal variation, and regret is measured relative to a (dynamic) oracle that plays the pointwise optimal action at each instant in time. Assuming that nature can choose any sequence of mean rewards such that their temporal variation does not exceed V (viewed as a temporal uncertainty budget), we characterize the complexity of this MAB game via the minimax regret which depends on V (the hardness of the problem) the horizon length T and the number of arms K. When the uncertainty budget V is not known a priori, we develop a family of master slave policies that adapt to the realized variation in rewards and provide numerical evidence suggesting that these policies are nearly minimax optimal.

Designing an Anti-swindle Mahjong Leisure Prototype System using RFID and ontology theory

Mahjong11http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong and http://atawmj.org.tw is the quintessential Chinese game. It is played with 144 tiles and each game has 16 rounds. Opportunities for cheating abound during each round of play. Video recording is the traditional method for preventing cheating, but it has significant flaws. These deficiencies are overcome by the Anti-swindle Mahjong Leisure System (AMLPS) which uses mature RFID technology and employs ontology to capture Mahjong playing knowledge from a focus group. Unlike current non-IT-based Mahjong systems, AMLPS has computing capabilities which make it applicable to other games such as bridge or chess. AMLPS has proven to be unique in the field of Mahjong games; it has two patents registered with Taiwan’s Intellectual Property Office. The low cost of AMLPS gives it significant potential market value.

An MPS-BNS Mixed Strategy Based on Game Theory for Wireless Mesh Networks

To achieve a valid effect of wireless mesh networks against selfish nodes and selfish behaviors in the packets forwarding, an approach named mixed MPS-BNS strategy is proposed in this paper. The proposed strategy is based on the Maximum Payoff Strategy (MPS) and the Best Neighbor Strategy (BNS). In this strategy, every node plays a packet forwarding game with its neighbors and records the total payoff of the game. After one round of play, each player chooses the MPS or BNS strategy for certain probabilities and updates the strategy accordingly. In MPS strategy, each node chooses a strategy that will get the maximum payoff according to its neighbor's strategy. In BNS strategy, each node follows the strategy of its neighbor with the maximum total payoff and then enters the next round of play. The simulation analysis has shown that MPS-BNS strategy is able to evolve to the maximum expected level of average payoff with faster speed than the pure BNS strategy, especially in the packets forwarding beginning with a low cooperation level. It is concluded that MPS-BNS strategy is effective in fighting against selfishness in different levels and can achieve a preferable performance.

Repeated Cheap-Talk Games of Common Interest between a Decision-Maker and an Expert of Unknown Statistical Bias

Two agents are engaged in a joint activity that yields a common perperiod payoff at two rounds of play. The expert announces the probability that the current state of the world is low, instead of high, at each stage. Having received the report of the expert, the decision-maker takes action at every period according to his posterior beliefs. At the end of each round of play, the true current state is verifiable. The distinctive assumption of the paper is that the decision-maker makes a subjective appraisal of the expert’s reliability: he considers the expert’s true forecasts as the outcomes of an experiment of unknown statistical bias. The paper shows that the expert will have instrumental reputational concerns, related to the future estimate of the systematic error associated to his predictions. In contrast with previous work, reputational concerns are shown to enhance the credibility of the initial messages, and to increase both the agents’ expected payoff at the first round of play in equilibrium. The equilibrium messages will be noisy, but noisiness will be less costly than it would be in single-stage games.

If Nobody is Going There Anymore Because it's Too Crowded, Then Who is Going? Experimental Evidence of Learning And Imitation in the El Farol Coordination Game

This paper is a study of Yogi Berra's colorful non sequitur: Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. Many economic markets remind one of Berra's insightful observation. One desires to buy an asset, such as a stock, when more people are selling than buying. However, this situation increases the number of buyers and tips the market to favor sellers. This paper evaluates coordination among agents in these environments. In particular, this paper discusses how people implicitly learn to coordinate their actions when such coordination is beneficial, but difficult. It uses the experimental method pioneered by Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith. During a series of experiments involving human subjects and simulated agents, subjects repeatedly update their strategies during play of a coordination game known as the El Farol Bar Game. In this experiment a subject is able to partially observe her opponents' previous strategies and payoffs before setting her strategy for the next round of play. Results indicate that play did not converge to the stage game's pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Also, subjects routinely imitated the most successful strategies. This flocking behavior led to socially inefficient outcomes.

On Myopic Equilibria in Dynamic Games with Endogenous Discounting

This paper derives an equilibrium for a competitive multi-stage game in which an agents' current action influences his probability of survival into the next round of play. This is directly relevant in banking, where a banks' current lending and pricing decisions determines its future probability of default. In technical terms, our innovation is to consider a multi-stage game with endogenous discounting. An equilibrium for such a multi-stage game with endogenous discounting has not been derived before in the literature.

Saint Louis University School of Medicine

Saint Louis University School of Medicine

Revocable commitments to public goods provision under the real‐time protocol of play

AbstractUsing the real‐time protocol of play—a relatively new experimental mechanism in which the order of play and timing of decisions are determined endogenously—we investigate voluntary contributions to the provision of pure public goods. We consider the case where the good is binary, players are asymmetric, communication is prohibited, and all‐or‐none contributions to the public good can be withdrawn at any time during the round of play. Our results: (1) support an equilibrium in which contributors maximize the sum of their own payoffs; (2) show considerably higher levels of contribution than under the more commonly used simultaneous protocol of play; and (3) exhibit no decrease in level of contribution across multiple iterations of the stage game. On comparing our results to those of Goren et al. (2003), we conclude that modifying the mechanism so that contributions once made cannot be revoked yields significantly higher levels of contribution over the course of the game. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Finitely Repeated Prisoners' Dilemma Games - Do Players use Backward or Forward Induction?

In the one-shot version of the Prisoners' Dilemma (PD) game, individuals pursue mutually destructive strategies (they both defect). The repeated PD examines whether interactions over time can induce players to adopt cooperative strategies. Cooperation is possible in the infinitely repeated PD. However, in the finitely repeated version, backward induction forces immediate mutual defection. Cooperation becomes possible if players are unsure of when the final round will be (Myerson 1991, Brams and Kilgour 2002), or when players are 'absent-minded' regarding the current round of play (Dilger 1998), since players will use forward, rather than backward, induction. In this paper, we develop a model in which cooperation may be sustainable in a finitely repeated PD game, even when players have perfect knowledge of the current round number and final round number. We analyse whether boundedly rational players use backward or forward induction in such a game. Players use forward induction if there are many rounds of play remaining, and the end round is a distant prospect. They only switch to backward induction at a critical round (when the end round is in sight). We believe that the insights of the model are so important for practical conflict scenarios, that they should be tested in an experimental game. In the final section, we suggest specifications for such a game.

Teaching a multidisciplinary approach to cancer treatment during surgical clerkship via an interactive board game

Background: Although educators agree that the approach to cancer management must be multidisciplinary, medical students usually observe cancer patients through the eyes of a single specialist at any given time. Methods: In order to teach third-year medical students that cancer management is multidisciplinary, we developed the Oncology Game, an interactive, computer-assisted board game built on the principles of self-directed learning and student-student interaction. Eight “patients” with different histologic types of cancer are distributed randomly to 4 students, who play in teams of 2. The object is for the team to obtain the best treatment for its patients by advancing them via a roll of dice through surgical, medical, and radiation oncology clinics in the order most logical for the patient’s particular cancer type. To test improvement in cognitive skills as a function of play, 16 students participated in a tournament taking parallel pretest and posttests before and after each round of play. Results: Students demonstrated a statistically significant change in the total number of questions answered correctly each time they played the Oncology Game (F = 4.16, P = 0.018; Pretest Round 1: 8.88 ± 0.58; Posttest Round 1: 9.63 ± 0.42; Pretest Round 2: 10.75 ± 0.62; Posttest Round 2: 11.5 ± 0.85). Post hoc pairwise comparison revealed a significant improvement in student performance after playing two rounds of the Oncology Game. Based on the postgame survey, students felt they improved their understanding of oncologic principles (4.56 ± 0.13), knowledge of malignancies (4.50 ± 0.13), and appreciation for the multidisciplinary nature of cancer management (4.56 ± 0.13). Conclusions: Improved test scores and postgame survey results demonstrate that third-year medical student students can learn about basic oncology principles and gain an appreciation for oncology as a multidisciplinary field of medicine through an interactive, computer-assisted board game.

On the level of cooperative behavior in a local-interaction model

We study local interaction within a population located on a connected graph. Subjects engage in several bilateral interactions during each round in a generalized Prisoners' Dilemma (PD). In each round of play one randomly selected player gets the possibility to update the action he plays in this PD. All individuals use the update rule “Win Cooperate, Lose Defect,” a multi-player variant of Tit-for-Tat. Theoretical results on the set of stable states of the associated dynamics are provided for the cases with and without rare mutations. Simulations provide insight into the probability distribution over these stable states. In both cases a rather high probability is assigned to stable states with a moderate level of cooperation implying that dominated strategies are used. Furthermore, the probability of reaching the stable state with Nash equilibrium play is small.

“I'll Take Gender Differences for $1000!” Domain-Specific Intellectual Success on “Jeopardy”

A great deal of laboratory research has demonstrated that women underestimate their intellect and abilities, and we studied whether this tendency manifested itself outside the laboratory by examining the performance of men and women on the television game show “Jeopardy”. Information about the masculinity and femininity of the topic categories for 65 games was collected, and selections, answers,wagering strategies, and earnings were noted for 195 White men and women contestants on the show. Men were more likely than women to appear as contestants, made most of the selections in the game, and won more money. Until the end of the game, men selected and correctly answered a disproportional number of questions from masculine topic categories, which appeared more often during the first round of play. Women chose more feminine and neutral questions than did men, and correctly answered those questions at a proportional rate. Wagering strategies differed late in the game, as men bet a higher percent of their earnings than did women, but only when wagering on masculine topics. Several explanations for differing performance of men and women on “Jeopardy”are offered, including confidence in ability due to self-estimation of intelligence, differential use of evaluative feedback, and the gender role appropriateness of demonstrating intellect.

Teacher to Teacher: A Number Line with Character

Vince and Sarah are playing the Factor Game, a two-person game in which me first player selects a number from 1 to 30 (see game board in fig. 1). The second player then selects all the divisors of the first number that are less than that number. If Vince begins the game by choosing 13, Sarah would select 1 because the divisors of 13 are 1 and 13 and Vince has already elected 13. The score is then 13 to 1 in favor of Vince. During the second round of play it is Sarah's turn to go first. She chooses 24 and has a total of 1 + 24 = 25 points. However, next Vince can select 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 12 (the remaining divisors of 24), which, added to his previous score of 13. will give a total of 48 point. Once a number is chosen, it is out of play and can be marked off or covered up. A play is legal only if a divisor remains on the board for the opponent to select. A player making an illegal move gets to keep the number chosen, but loses his or her next turn. The game ends when no more legal moves are possible. The highest sum wins. The Factor Game is the first activity in Factors and Multiples, a unit of the Middle Grades Mathematics Project (Fitzgerald et al. 1986).

Punishment and Type of Feedback in a Simulated Commons Dilemma

351 research participants in groups of three harvested resources from a slowly regenerating, shared pool in a computer-assisted game. Feedback after each round of play consisted of information about the status of the resource pool, information about the other participants' harvesting choices, or no feedback at all. Exploitation was either not punished or punished by individual or group. Analysis showed that either form of punishment improved harvests from the common resource but that feedback had no such influence.

Non-random shuffling strategies in blackjack

Numerous playing and betting strategies for the game of twenty-one have been computed assuming the deck or decks are randomly shuffled. In practice, dealers do not spend the time necessary (it takes too long) to completely randomly shuffle the decks used. Hence, there is information not only from the current round of play, but potentially from the previous round of play. We present a model for a non-random shuffle and assert ways in which this information can be used. Rules are derived using a normal approximation which updates the current strategies utilizing information from a non-random shuffle.

Language Play and the Learning Disabled

Many students I work with are incompetent writers. Others, thanks to teachers who equate the ability to spell and punctuate with the ability to write, think they are incompetent. The school system classifies them learning disabled. In my nine years of teaching learning disabled students, I have often doubted I could help them learn to write or spell. But certain moments have had a resoundingly right feeling. Looking back, they center on a unifying theme-playing with language. Unfortunately, my New England conscience does not let me feel good when students have a good time in my classroom. It resists the notion that anything good can come from play. It warns that when people are handicapped they have to work harder than anyone else to get ahead, and above all, they have to suffer. I am recounting some of my students' language-play experiences because I think my conscience has only part of the truth. It's right about the work but wrong about the suffering. Many students I work with suffer inordinately in school, often without getting ahead at all. But I have found that when they play with language, they can begin to work productively like the rest of us. And I want to convince the rest of you who teach the sufferers to beware of your consciences. Talking about students playing with language or having a good time in my class does not automatically put me on the side of soft rather than hard educators. Language-play experiences teach a specific skill. The first is a game I stumbled on one day soon after I began teaching junior high learning disabled students in Greenwich, Connecticut. I used it for spelling. But it can be used for drill of any content where there is only one right answer. (Grammar, punctuation, character names, and descriptions.) Who's Right? seeks to overcome the problem of ineffective selective attention which many disabled students exhibit. I suppose it is a version of the old-fashioned spelling bee with scoring and rules of play modified for students more likely to get the wrong than the right answer. After every three tries at the word, the teacher says which answer is right and writes it on the board. Students, who may have a chance to answer the same question in another round of play, pay attention to the right answer. One year I had an end of the day class filled with extremely immature ninth graders. They asked to play the game whenever they had to prepare for a spelling test. My conscience said, They're trying to get away with something. And they were. But they were trying to get away with what I wanted them to do. It was one activity that kept the sluggish ones awake and the hyperactive ones in focus. And twenty minutes of this kind of study usually resulted in immediate review tests that were at least eighty percent correct, whereas normal individual study for the same amount of time gave students in this class sixty percent or less.