Balloons

What the real one looks like

One balloon at a time, a Pump button and a Collect button, a total earned, and the amount sitting in the balloon. 39 balloons in three colours that keep coming back in a mixed order. No clock: candidates report about four minutes. It is the Balloon Analogue Risk Task from the psychology literature, shortened, and the sizes here follow the original task: the burst pump is drawn evenly from one to 8 on orange, 32 on yellow and 128 on blue. Pymetrics publishes none of its own ranges, so treat the colours as the lesson and the numbers as ours.

How to play it

Spend the first balloon or two of each colour finding the range, then settle on a stop rule per colour and keep to it. Because the burst pump is evenly spread, the expected value of collecting after k pumps peaks halfway up the range: about 4 on orange, about 16 on yellow and about 64 on blue. That strategy averages $27.30 a run, against the $17 or so prep sites report as typical. A lucky run beats it; a steady one beats the average every time.

What it is reading

Risk tolerance and learning, not money. The measures behind it are the average pumps on the balloons you collected, whether a burst makes you pump that colour less next time, and how consistent your stopping point is. A firm matches that profile against people already in the role, so there is no score to beat, and playing it timid is read as clearly as playing it wild. The habit worth practising is a calm, repeatable stop rule.