Title: Matching Experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Abstract: In my Bachelor Thesis, we conducted a pilot experiment to investigate whether cognitively challenging matching experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk can provide significant results. Our results showed that this is possible. In our experiment, subjects had to learn one of two popular mechanisms (the Boston Mechanism and the Probabilistic Serial Mechanism) and try to find beneficial manipulations. We showed that workers can be selected appropriately and educated to understand complex mechanisms. We also investigated the search paths which human subjects used to beneficial manipulations in fixed scenarios of one sided matchings. We showed that humans exhibited bounded rational strategic behaviour in the sense that they more frequently found local rather than global manipulations in both mechanisms.
