Alain Ledoux

Alain Ledoux is the inventor of the guess 2/3 of the average-game. In 1981, Ledoux used this game as a tie breaker in his French magazine Jeux et Stratégie. He asked about 4,000 readers, who reached the same amount of points in previous puzzles, to state an integer between 1 and 1,000,000,000. The winner was the one who guessed closest to 2/3 of the average guess. In 1995, Rosemarie Nagel revealed the potential of guessing games of that kind: They are able to disclose participants´ "depth of reasoning". Due to the analogy to Keynes´ comparison of newspaper beauty contests and stock market investments the guessing game is also known as the Keynesian beauty contest. Rosemarie Nagel´s experimental beauty contest is a famous game in Experimental economics. The founding father of this game was unearthed in 2009 during an online beauty contest experiment with chess players provided by the University of Kassel (Germany): Alain Ledoux, together with over 6,000 other chess players, participated in that experiment which looked familiar to him.