Behavioral-economic Games with Commercially Available Robots

Abstract

Behavioral-economic games such as the dictator game have been a popular method for studying human-human interactions which can also be used to study human--robot interaction. Using commercially available robots, we showed participants photographs of 18 robots, and had them play a dictator game against these robots after answering a set of 12 questions regarding each robot's characteristics. Using principal component analysis and linear mixed effects modeling, we found that we could reduce our original 12 robot characteristics to three components---likability for the robot, anthropomorphism, and utility---which individually predicted dictator game offers. The findings are potentially of interest to robot designers and social scientists.