Human behavior in different contexts is explored by experimental sociologists and economists through decision-making experiments that reproduce socio-economic scenarios in a stylized way. Traditional experiments are organized in physical labs or through crowd-work platforms and volunteers receive economic incentives to guarantee the validity of their answers.

The general aim of the project is to explore a new way of rewarding participants, by providing them a ludic experience in lieu of the economic reward. As a first step in this direction, the project will develop a client-server architecture to run a virtual game implementing the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic game for which many datasets of traditional experiments are available for comparison.

The idea is to exploit the ICT services of Politecnico di Milano to host the server for a mobile app. The hosting services @PoliMi are based on docker containers running on a web server. The developed architecture will be modular and scalable, to serve for future experiments of different nature.

Required skills

– Web application programming and networking

– Docker container technology
– Data base management
– Gitlab version control
Contacts:

Prof. Fabio Dercole (teacher of System’s Theory, DEIB Polimi, fabio.dercole@polimi.it),

Prof. Danilo Ardagna (teacher of Computing Infrastructures, DEIB Polimi, danilo.ardagna@polimi.it)