Shortish update on my economics project

[lathany]

I got back my project earlier this week. I received highest course mark result for it - 90. It's also the best mark I've been awarded for a self-designed project as part of an academic course (among other things, I wrote about the link between story-telling and roleplaying back when I was studying Homer: Poetry and Society for a mark somewhere in the 70s).

I thoroughly enjoyed doing it (I even enjoyed writing it up) and many thanks again to everyone who agreed to let me steal some hours of their time and interrogate them.

Comments

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

Hurrah! Go lathany!

[lathany.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[dracunculus.livejournal.com]

Can we read it? Or get a quick synopsis of your findings?

Sam and I had wry fun comparing our answers. I think we missed each other most of the time because we I was concerned with what was "fair" and he was only concerned with doing what I wanted.

[lathany.livejournal.com]

I'll write something up on LJ either this weekend, next weekend or after my exam (which is about a week and a half away). It'll be rather vague in places so that people remain anonymous.

A (fairly) brief summary - it wasn't so much about whether people met (although I had an annex showing when they did) as what sort of reasoning they used for making decisions. The game theory matrix in question is called "the dating game" (by the OU) and it works on the principle that people are rational, keen to maximise their utility and so forth and I suspected (before I started this) that it didn't work for couples despite its name.

So I set up two alternative rationales; one that people would be using the game theory as is and the alternative that they would use other types of approach - such as turn-taking or concern for their partner's wellbeing above their own (this last gets slightly complicated in the model due to the old argument about whether doing things for other people is really about satisfying your own need to be caring, etc). Then I worked out the scenarios to see if different circumstances changed what was effectively the same model (they did - eg. family events made people more inclined to attend their own family than be with their partner for whichever event) - and why.

The conclusion was that most of my sample fell into the alternatives - for example, turn-taking was the most popular response in the party history scenario (although by no means universal). Possibly the most interesting result is that, as far as you can tell from a tiny sample, there was no difference in the answers from men and from women (I interviewed no same sex couples as I had no volunteers among the ones I knew) and almost no difference based on relationship length (the couple with the longest relationship had a slightly different attitude to the family scenario).

[dracunculus.livejournal.com]

Neat! Thanks for the synopsis!

Well done

[metame.livejournal.com]

Congratulations and celebrations...

your correlations and tabulations...

[sosoclever.livejournal.com]

w00t!

Can I read the one about roleplaying and storytelling?;-)