Abstract for: Sources of frustration in the Beer Distribution Game

The purpose of this paper is to gain more insight into what frustrates, if anything, players in the Beer Distribution Game when there are no other human players in the game. In particular, we aim to uncover which aspects of the game are most frustrating to them, at what times in the game, and if their own performance affects their frustration in a significant manner. We use the online Beer Distribution Game as our experimental setting and structural equation modeling to test our hypotheses. We find that one potential source of frustration is that players do not think the effort they invested in the game translates to their performance. We also find that their performance positively affects their satisfaction in the game but does not matter much once the game is over.