Corey Nyako

Hello!
I am Corey Nyako, a data analyst in San Francisco.
Machine
Learning
Python D3.js Other

Networked Public Goods

Undergraduate Thesis

This is the undergraduate thesis that I completed while studying at Florida State University. It involved a literature review, four hypotheses, game theory, a controlled economic experiment, and an agent based computational simulation.

Abstract

Networked public goods are non-excludable goods in an interdependent social or geographic context. Most research on the subject thus far is concerned with how different strategies evolve, given certain parameters and decision rules. With the use of an experiment, this study may be the first to consider how humans actually behave in networked public goods games. A computer simulation is used to recreate the results from the experiment. The simulation made it possible to extend the number of rounds played far beyond what is possible in the experiment. The goal of this study is to better understand how human behavior causes wealth and inequity to evolve in networked public goods games. The results from the experiment show that most people reciprocate the behavior of their group members to some degree. The results from the simulation show that wealthy agents tend to cluster with other wealthy agents over time and the disparity in wealth is greater when the value of producing the public good is lower.