Meaningful learning in weighted voting games: an experiment

By employing binary committee choice problems, this paper investigates how varying or eliminating feedback about payoffs affects: (1) subjects’ learning about the underlying relationship between their nominal voting weights and their expected payoffs in weighted voting games; (2) 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 (weighted voting games) and obtain a payoff stochastically determined by a voting theory. We found that: (i) subjects learned to choose the committee that generates a higher expected payoff even without feedback about the payoffs they received; (ii) there was statistically significant evidence of ‘meaningful learning’ (transfer of 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.