Independent and Repeated Experiment

[guangning liu]

Hi Max,

 

We hope that 30 subjects independently participate in and take our experiment so that 1) they don’t need to participate at the same time slot, and 2) they don’t need to wait for others every Period. We just want to repeat the same experiment 30 times.

 

So far we have successfully installed our program on ZTU according to the instructions on our official website. But with that setting, subjects have to wait for others every Period. So any solutions deal with this situation and enable independent executions?

 

Best,

Lewis

[Max R. P. Grossmann]

Hi Lewis,

I personally haven't yet used the "periods" feature of z-Tree with zTu, maybe someone else can chime in. I know that without periods, subjects can indeed participate independently.

However, an easy (but ugly) fix is to just copy and paste the relevant stages to duplicate them.

And by the way, perhaps z-Tree's newest version is actually capable of running independent periods.

Best,

Max

[iwo]

Hi Lewis,

if there is no interaction between people, that's extremely easy to do
with z-Tree 5, indeed. It allows you to put participants simultaneously
into different treatments (which can, of course, be multiple "copies" of
the same treatment; it would also allow you to assign each participant
to her own treatment at the time of "arrival"). If information needs to
be passed on from one participant to the next, some things are thinkable
but things would get more complicated...

All the best,
irenaeus


Am 22.07.21 um 10:04 schrieb 'Max R. P. Grossmann' via z-Tree unleashed:

[guangning liu]

Thanks Max. Thanks Irenaeus. Thanks for your kind reply! 

I will have a try on the methods you recommend. And I will update the progress so that it may help others.

Hope our forum helps more researchers!

Cheers,

Lewis

[guangning liu]

To whom may also concern how to enable subjects doing experiments independently,

Thanks to the suggestions from Max and Irenaeus, now we have enabled independent experiment. Now we would like to share the methods with you. This is one solution, and I think there may exist more possible ways to achieve the same result.

First, this function can be achieved by Z-tree 5.1 and onwards. So you need to update your version.

Then, you can add in the “welcome()” command in the “treatment” table. You can check the detailed introduction from this link (https://www.ztree.uzh.ch/static/doc/version_5_extended_releasenotes.pdf), with which you are allowed to achieve other customized functions.

Another thing needs to be noticed is that you should start a one-subject experiment at the beginning and then add in more subjects.

Thanks for the help from Max and Irenaeus and hope our forum helps more researchers!

Best,

Lewis