The way people behave is often affected by the way their friends behave. This may be evident in the similar way that they dress, common hobbies, and their shared interests. The information and ideas that people share with their friends can shape common behaviors.

Social networks are an effective tool for studying this type of phenomenon because they give us visibility to the networks with which a person interacts and allows us to draw conclusions on how a person’s behavior is affected by this interaction.

In this experiment, we test how people’s investment decisions depend on their friend’s investment decisions. In other words, someone might make a decision about a stock purchase based on a decision made on that stock by a friend.

The Investment Game gives insight into the understanding of how people are influenced by their friends by allowing them to invest with each other in various types of social networks. Players decide how much they want to invest. Their returns depend on the size of the investment made by the players their friends.

This experiment is currently running on Amazon Mechanical Turk, so there is real money to be made for each player.