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Cognition and Behavior in Normal-form Games: An Experimental Study
by
Vincent P. Crawford
University of California, San Diego
Coauthors: Miguel Costa-Gomes (Harvard Business School), Bruno Broseta (Organismo Publico Valenciano de Investigacion)
This paper reports experiments designed to study strategic sophistication, the extent to which behavior in games reflects attempts to predict others' decisions, taking their incentives into account. Subjects played normal-form games with various patterns of iterated dominance and unique pure-strategy equilibria without dominance, using a computer interface that allowed them to look up hidden payoffs as often as desired, one at a time, while recording their look-up sequences. Monitoring subjects' information searches along with their decisions allows us more precisely to identify their decision rules, and subjects' deviations from the search patterns suggested by equilibrium analysis help to predict their deviations from equilibrium decisions.
Date received: April 20, 2000
Copyright © 2000 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caez-03.