6000 Chess Players Take Part in a "Beauty Contest"

Hey, I participated in this. I guessed 0 the first round, and IIRC I raised my estimate to 33 in the second round. I suppose the lesson is that I'm a poor judge of human nature.

I tried this experiment a few years ago with a roomful of actuaries, who I suspected would be likely to "iterate" their response a few more times than the average person, and the answer came out at 14.

Even in a room full of game theorists, will the winner be at one. There are a few considerations. One is that one person who slips up either through a misunderstanding or spite will throw off the average. Another consideration is that if you win with zero or one, you will have to split any prize pool with many other players.

Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average "How Real People Think in Strategic Games" (discusses game): http://www.msri.org/people/members/sara/articles/expecon.pdf

This is basically a Keynesian Beauty Contest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

The results around 22 aren't too surprising: most people will probably quickly figure out that the target cannot possibly be above 66.67, but few will realize that this implies that the target will be below 44.44. If you assume the guesses will be randomly distributed from 0 - 66, you get a target of 22, which isn't a bad guess for most of the times this experiment was performed on the proles.