CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Sári, András Lajos |
|---|---|
| Title | Are You Sure It Is Random? - Measuring People's Beliefs of Generated Randomness |
| Summary | In this thesis, my aim is to measure people’s beliefs about how easy it is to identify their made up random series as human made. I achieve this by having them participate in a game, where they generate 8-long coin toss series of heads and tails. Their main goal is to make up sequences that my algorithm classifies as a true series of coin tosses upon comparing it with a true Bernoulli series. After generating the series the participants are offered a deal to exchange their game for a lottery, thus revealing their beliefs. I ran the experiment on 30 people whom I randomly assigned into 5 treatment groups representing 5 different offers. In the experiment I identify people generated series with over 60% accuracy. I find that people display a wide range of beliefs from seriously underestimating to seriously overestimating their chance of success, overestimation being the more common effect. In conclusion people are particularly bad at predicting how easy it is to identify them. |
| Supervisor | Kaufmann, Marc |
| Department | Economics MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/sari_andras.pdf |
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