Taking risks by flying paper airplanes Dataset

We propose an outdoor activity to be conducted in game theory courses where students are invited to throw airplanes in order to win a prize. The experiment consists in flying self-made paper airplanes to earn points in three trials. The main purpose of these outdoor classroom experiments is to motivate students to learn by experiencing concepts of uncertainty in the gain domain (risk aversion). After the experiment, the students are predisposed to think about decisions under uncertainty. Specifically, we provide a theoretical model to explain the participants' decisions, optimal behavior, and deviations from that behavior. Overall, our activity creates a setting to foster students’ interest in the study of decision making under uncertainty.

We invited 103 university students (85 Spaniards and 18 international students) from an Andalusian university (southern Spain) to participate in an outdoor activity. All the participants were enrolled in the course Game Theory for Social Sciences, which is offered to communications, international relations, business administration, and law students, as well as international students.
Participation was not compulsory (3 students, all of whom were Spanish nationals, did not participate). The students were not aware of the instructions prior to the experiment. The final sample comprised 100 university students (62% females) with a mean age of 22.23 years (SD = 0.140). The experiment was run in two sessions: 49 students participated at the Cordoba campus and 51 at the Seville campus. Each student made 3 individual decisions, adding up to a total of 300 decisions.