Designing Shared Information Displays for Strategic Decision-Making

This technical report investigates the design of shared information displays in strategic settings, focusing on how interface design choices affect decision-making among agents with varying levels of strategic sophistication. The study employs a novel staged experimental design, utilizing a repeated congestion game where participants act as taxi drivers using a shared display to make decisions about ride searches. The report outlines two critical design factors: the visualization of prediction uncertainty and the depiction of prediction error. Through large pre-registered experiments, the authors identify trade-offs between individual decision-making and collective social welfare. The findings indicate that while displays optimized for individual decisions may lead to lower overall social welfare, they can enhance perceived reliability and trustworthiness of the information. The research contributes to understanding how design elements influence strategic outcomes and motivates further investigation into the effects of uncertainty communication in shared displays.