THE EXPERIMENTAL GAME.

Consumer decisions are extremely difficult to predict with reasonable accuracy. If they could be predicted, marketing men would be able to initiate changes that would give the consumers more nearly what they desire. This matching of consumer desires and the available supply of products continues to be done largely through trial and error. In order to predict consumer decisions more accurately and thus to satisfy consumer desires, we need available data that adequately express the outcome of previous trial and error solutions. The problem of fully utilizing past experience stems largely from the fact that the outcome of one experience cannot be directly compared with that of another experience. In an effort to make experiences comparable, psychologists have found it useful to simplify past experiences to the point of expressing them in terms of risk and reward. When decisions are reduced to the simple form of risk and reward, there is a large sacrifice of realism. At the same time it enables them to generate synthetically large amounts of decision-making data that hold interest to marketing men. Conclusions are being reached about general risk-taking patterns that appear to exist: people do like to gamble; they do not gamble in a "mathematically correct" way; their willingness to gamble is definitely influenced by certain factors, one of which is the extent to which they are satisfied with their present position (the ratio of past winnings to past losses). We believe that experimental games will contribute significantly to our understanding of consumer decision making. Experimental games offer a promising method of studying the uncertainty consumers feel about reaching goals and obtaining satisfaction. Although the study of experimental games is still in its infancy, we feel sure that taking this approach is a good gamble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]