Abstract

By employing binary committee choice problems, this paper investigates how varying or eliminating feedback about payoffs affects: subjects’ learning about the underlying relationship between their nominal voting weights and their expected payoffs in weighted voting games; the transfer of acquired learning from one committee choice problem to a similar but different problem. In the experiment, subjects choose to join one of two committees and obtain a payoff stochastically determined by a voting theory. We found that: subjects learned to choose the committee that generates a higher expected payoff even without feedback about the payoffs they received; there was statistically significant evidence of “meaningful learning” only for the treatment with no payoff-related feedback. This finding calls for re-thinking existing models of learning to incorporate some type of introspection.