About a year ago I posted a link to a YouTube video of the Golden Balls “Split or Steal” game, hailing it as a godsend for teachers of game theory and the Prisoners’ Dilemma.  That video has made its way around the web in the year since and I sat down to prepare my introductory game theory lecture yesterday looking for something new.

Well, it turns out that now there are many, many new videos of Split or Steal on YouTube and you can spend hours watching these.  Here is my favorite and the one I used in class today.

I also heard from Seamus Coffey who has analyzed the data from Split or Steal games and finds:

  • Women are more cooperative than men, non-whites more than whites, the old more cooperative than the young.
  • There is more cooperation between opposite-sex players than when the players are of the same sex.
  • The young don’t cooperate with the old, and the old discriminate even more against the young.
  • Blonde women cooperate a lot.  Men cooperate less with blondes than with brunettes.

Here is a link to a paper by John List who looks at similar patterns in the game Friend or Foe.

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