[ACT-R-users] Choice prediction competitions

[Ido Erev]

Dear Colleagues, 

 

We write to invite you to participate in the choice prediction competitions
that will be conducted as part of the special issue of the journal Games

(http://www.mdpi.com/journal/games/) on "Predicting Behavior in Games"

(http://www.mdpi.com/si/games/predict-behavior/). 

 

You are invited to participate as a competitor, and as an organizer.  Below
you can find two calls that clarify this invitation. The first is the call
to participate in the first competition that we organize. The second is a
call to propose and organize your own competition. 

 

 

Call 1. The first "Games" competition: Predicting behavior in market entry
games.

The first competition focuses on the prediction of behavior in repeated
4-person market entry games. The organizers first ran (in March 2010 at
Harvard) an experimental study of (40) games that were randomly selected
from a well-defined space of market entry games. The raw experimental
results of this study, referred to as the "estimation experiment," are
presented in the competition's website
(http://sites.google.com/site/gpredcomp/).

 

In addition, the competition website includes the rules of the competition,
and a link to a paper that summarizes the results of the estimation
experiment and explores the value of several baseline models

(http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/1/2/117/.)

 

The site explains that the goal of the participants in the competition is to
predict the results of a second experiment. This study, referred to as the
"competition experiment," will be run by the organizers in May 2010 (but the
results will be kept confidential until 2 September 2010). The competition
experiment will use the same method as the estimation experiment, but will
study different games (drawn from the same space of games) and different
subjects.

 

To participate in the competition you will have to email us a computer
program (in MATLAB, Visual Basic, or SAS) that reads the parameters of the
games (the incentive structure) as input, and predicts the main results as
output. The program should be an implementation of your favorite model. To
develop and/or estimate your model you are encouraged to analyze the data of
the estimation experiment, and to build on the baseline models that were
posted in the competition website.

 

The submitted models will be ranked based on the mean squared deviation
between the predictions and the results of the competition experiment. The
prize for the winners will include an invitation to publish a paper that
describes the winning model in Games, and an invitation to a special
workshop.

 

The submission deadline for this competition is 1 September 2010. You are
allowed to submit one model as a first author and to co-author up to three
additional submissions.

 

 

Call 2. Invitation to propose and organize a competition.

You are invited to propose a choice competition to the special issue of
Games.

The proposed competition should focus on interesting spaces of game, with
the hope that they will improve our understanding of the predictive value of
different descriptive models. 

The format of the competitions should be similar to the format of the
competition described above. Specifically, they should be based on two large
experimental studies: An estimation experiment, and a competition
experiment. 

The organizers will first run the estimation experiment (on games that will
be randomly selected from a well-defined space of games). Then, they will
post the results on the web, and publish (in Games) a paper that introduces
the competition. The paper should summarize the results of the estimation
experiment, evaluate leading baseline models, and describe the rules of the
competition. The main task in the competition will be to predict behavior in
the competition experiment. 

 

Proposals for organization of competitions should describe the motivation
and the proposed method (including the space of games you will study). They
can use the format of the first five pages of the paper that describes the
introduction to the choice prediction competition for market entry games
that can be found at http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/1/2/117/. Please send
e-mail proposals and related questions to Ido Erev (erev at tx.technion.ac.il).

 

 

Best regards, 

 

Ido Erev, Eyal Ert and Al Roth

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu/pipermail/act-r-users/attachments/20100629/0ce3ea4d/attachment.html>