A Game for Studying Maintenance Alerts' Effectiveness

Avraham Shvartzon, Amos Azaria, Sarit Kraus, Claudia V. Goldman, Omer Tsimhoni, Joachim Meyer

Abstract: In this paper we present a space-ship game which allows us to evaluate human behavior with respect to maintenance and repairing malfunctions. We ran an experiment in which subjects played the space-ship game twice. In one of the games, they were simply told that they should perform maintenance every 20 seconds, and in the other game they received alerts from an agent for performing maintenance every 20 seconds. We show that when receiving alerts, people tented to perform more maintenance, and perform slightly better (not statistically significant). We suggest that in order to further improve the performance of the players in the space-ship game, one should also consider when to provide these alerts.