Assigning specific roles in online experiments

[Daniel Frey]

Hello Chris and community

I am trying to program an experiment for Mturk that relies on the strategy method, i.e. the decisions of the participants are independent of each other. At the end of the experiment, they are merged in groups of 6 for the payoff.

Concretely, the procedure of the experiment is the following:

At the beginning, the participants are randomly assigned one of six different roles.

Before the payout, they are grouped (with the group_by_arrival_time_method()) and once all six different roles are present, they get grouped together and the payout for these six participants is calculated.

This process works fine so far.

The problem arises when someone drops out in the middle of the experiment. Then a role is missing that must be present for the payout.

I would like to not use bots and therefore wish that the role that is missing is replaced by a new participant with the missing role. In addition, I would also like to not use a wait page in the middle of the experiment .

Unfortunately, the role assignment is iterative: 1st participant gets role A, 2nd participant role B, 3rd participant role C, ..., 6th participant role F. I.e. if a participant with role A aborts, then 5 participants with the other roles (B, C, D, E, F) get stuck on the waitpage.

 

My question : When assigning the role, is there any way to prioritize the missing role in the iterative process or just fill up the missing role ?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Daniel