Games of strategy in culture and economics research

ABSTRACT

Games are meant to be fun, yet economists have successfully developed games that are less fun and less understood by participants especially in developing countries. This paper surveys failures in risk attitudes elicitation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and questions the use of complex research tools such as multiple price list (MPL) approaches and behavioral games that rural participants have never played before. The failures can be avoided by using innovative research tools that ingest local activities like indigenous board games that the rural people have played for generations because these games are entertaining and closely related to the economic decisions they make. I provide a description of a variant of the indigenous strategic games of Africa- Mancala- and suggest a research agenda that applies the game in economics research—for risk attitudes elicitation, improving math skills of children and behavioral game theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Field experiments
• experimental methods
• risk elicitation
• games
• Africa

JEL CODES:

• Z13
• D91

Acknowledgement

I thank individuals many to mention here or even impossible to remember who taught me bawo as I was growing up. I extend my gratitude to Jason Kerwin, Terry Hurley, Nelson Nkhoma, Henry Kankwamba and Grivas Kayange for discussions on the various ideas in the paper. I thank the reviewers and the editors for suggestions that have improved the paper. All remaining errors are all mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Maxwell Mkondiwa is currently an Adjunct Research Fellow at Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources' Center for Agricultural Research and Development (CARD), Malawi. He recently completed his PhD in Applied Economics at University of Minnesota, USA. The work presented in this paper was conducted as a passionate side project during his PhD studies. His research focuses on the economics of scaling agricultural research recommendations. He is also pioneering the use of indigenous strategic games of Africa and African economic philosophy in economics research.

ORCID

Maxwell Mkondiwa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0008-9095

Notes

1 As pointed by a reviewer (thanks), the paper by Dupas and Robinson (2013) demonstrates the merits of using existing social processes—the Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCA)—when building a successful health savings scheme in Kenya.

2 There are many variants of the rules. I provide rules from my personal experience of playing the game. Other sources of rules of the game as played in Malawi include, Mwale (1996) and the following sites; http://gamecabinet.com/rules/Bao2.html and http://www.jacks.de/bawo/bawo_english2010.pdf.

3 The earliest paper I could find in the economics of language was published in 1965 by Jacob Maschak.

4 Most of the literature in bawo calls this ‘women’ version but this has a wrong sexist connotation that goes against the terminology that rural people who currently play the game use which is that it is a simpler version or the one they start to teach to kids.