World of Uncertainty

Overview: Every day we face uncertainties of different levels. Most of the decisions we make have some unknown or random component. If the decision is required on repeated events we can base our judgement on frequencies or probabilities. For example flipping a fair coin, we know that the objective probability of it falling on heads is 0.5 or in other words chances are 50×50. When objective probabilities cannot be known, a decision maker can express her/his personal uncertainty by subjective probabilities. Basically, this is a quantitative answer to the questions such as “What is a likelihood of a certain outcome”, “What are the chances that you are right?”, “How sure are you?”, “How confident you are on a 1 to 10 scale?” The answers to such questions are subjective and cannot be right or wrong. If you know much about subject matter your estimation might be more accurate. But subject knowledge or expertise is not enough for communicating subjective probabilities. It is important to have “normative” skills. One of the most important indicators of “good” subjective probability estimation is calibration. Good calibration means minimal over or under estimation.

Our game aims at training these normative skills in the players. It allows you to explore your own confidence in your own knowledge, receive detailed feedback and learn from calibration charts.

Playing the game: The game uses multiple choice questions on a variety of subjects. However this is not just an ordinary quiz. Its main purpose is to improve and calibrate players’ certainty and sense of probabilities rather than subject knowledge. Thus the topic of the quiz or difficulty level becames irrelevant so long as the player enjoys the quiz and is motivated to achieve higher scores. On answering each question, the player has to indicate his/her confidence as accurately as possible using an interactive slider. As a player adjusts the slider, corresponding payoffs for correct and incorrect outcomes will be shown. This payoff function is designed to encourage honest and accurate confidence judgement. In addition to immediate feedback, players can access results of all completed quizzes and calibration charts from personal profiles. Detailed feedback helps to correct over/under confidence in quantifying internal probabilities.

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