Name: Lada Burde
Address and telephone number at work:
Ben – Gurion University , Department of Business Administration, room 218
B.A. - 1985 – 1990, All Union Financial-Economical Institute in Moscow,
Finances and Credit
B.A. - 2000 – 2001, Tel Aviv University, core B.A. courses, Department of Economics
M.Sc. - 2002 – 2006, Tel Aviv University, Department of Economics
Name of advisor: Prof. Ariel Rubinstein
Title of thesis: "Some Issues in Dominance Rank and Decision Making
Economic Experiments"
The interest in experimental methods for evaluating economic theories has resulted in conducting experiments both with human subjects and in operant conditioning chambers using laboratory animals. The results of some studies show that certain features of the social behavior, exhibited by male hens kept in small groups, make them a good model of a primitive and elementary society in which an allocation of resources is driven by coercion. In the present study, we conducted experiments with domestic cocks, which had as a main objective to consider the decision making in the conditions of competition for resources by hens from small groups with previously stated dominance rank. The experiments included two stages. At the first stage of the experiments, the dominance rank of each individual within a group of three cocks was determined (the dominance hierarchies in all the groups were found to be linear), At the second, main, stage of the experiments, Number 2 in the hierarchy was offered to choose between two cages with food: one with Number 1 eating and another with Number 3 eating. There was a delay between the moment when the task was exposed to Number 2 and the moment when the access to the cages with food was permitted to it, and this time period varied from trial to trial. The results for each trial were: the time of delay (processing time or "decision time"), the choice made by Number 2 and the final distribution of hens in the cages. Each trial was also recorded on video.
Based on the results of our experiments the following conclusions can be drawn: (a) Cocks really deliberated over the decision; (b) As usual in the reasoning processes, cocks needed time to make a decision, and the more time they had the more was the probability of the correct decision.