An experimental study of serial and average cost pricing mechanisms

This paper reports the first experimental study of the serial and the average cost pricing mechanisms under five different treatments: a complete information treatment and four treatments designed to simulate distributed systems with extremely limited information, synchronous and asynchronous moves. Although the proportion of Nash equilibrium play under both mechanisms is statistically indistinguishable under complete information, the serial mechanism performs robustly better than the average cost pricing mechanism in distributed systems, both in terms of the proportion of equilibrium play and system efficiency.