Measuring attention and strategic behavior in games with private information
نویسندگان
چکیده
In experiments, people do not always appear to think very strategically or to infer the information of others from their choices. We report experimental results in games of private information with three information states, which vary in strategic complexity. “Mousetracking” is used to record which game payoffs subjects look at, for how long, to learn more about the thinking process. Subjects often deviate from Nash equilibrium choices, converge only modestly toward equilibrium across 40 trials, and often fail to look at payoffs which they need to in order to compute an equilibrium response. Theories such as QRE and cursed equilibrium, which can explain nonequilibrium choices, are not well supported by the combination of both choices and lookups. When cluster analysis is used to group subjects according to lookup patterns and choices, the clusters appear to correspond approximately to level-3, level-2 and level-1 thinking in level-k cognitive hierarchy models. The connection between looking and choices is strong enough that the time durations of looking at key payoffs can predict choices, to some extent, at the individual level and at the trial-by-trial level. ∗Support of LUSK Center (IB), the Office of the Provost at USC and the Microsoft Corporation (JDC), HFSP, NSF and Moore Foundation grants (CFC) and Moore Foundation (SWW) is gratefully acknowledged. Yi Zhu provided excellent research assistance. Mousetracking was developed by Chris Crabbe and Walter Yuan as an extension to their Multistage program. We are very grateful for their remarkable combination of enthusiasm and speed. Helpful comments were received from audiences at USC Law, Moore Foundation Retreat (March 09), ESA Washington 2009, Stanford SITE 2009, Southampton and Edinburgh. Send correspondence to: .
منابع مشابه
Cheap talk with two senders and complementary information
This paper studies a cheap talk model in which two senders having partial and non-overlapping private information simultaneously communicate with an uninformed receiver. The sensitivity of the receiver’s ideal action to one sender’s private information depends on the other sender’s private information. We show that the senders’information transmissions exhibit strategic complementarity: more in...
متن کاملSocial Learning with Payoff Complementarities∗
We incorporate strategic complementarities into a multi-agent sequential choice model with observable actions and private information. In this framework agents are concerned with learning from predecessors, signalling to successors, and coordinating their actions with those of others. Coordination problems have hitherto been studied using static coordination games which do not allow for learnin...
متن کاملInformation encryption in the expert management of strategic uncertainty
Strategic agents in incomplete-information environments have a conflicted relationship with uncertainty: it can keep them unpredictable to their opponents, but it must also be overcome to predict the actions of those opponents. We use a multivariate generalization of information theory to characterize the information processing behavior of strategic reasoning experts. We compare expert and novi...
متن کاملStrategic confrontation within monetary and financial authorities, and foreign exchange market participants in Iran: non-cooperative static games approach
The experience of large fluctuations in the Foreign Exchange Market in Iran and the impact of monetary and fiscal policies on this market revealed the importance of adopting a scientific approach by fiscal and monetary policymakers and paying attention to the behavior of other actors (Foreign Exchange Speculators) in the decision-making. The present study tries to evaluate the Social Loss of ad...
متن کاملLevel-k Auctions: Can a Non-Equilibrium Model of Strategic Thinking Explain the Winner's Curse and Overbidding in Private-Value Auctions?
This paper proposes a structural non-equilibrium model of initial responses to incompleteinformation games based on "level-k" thinking, which describes behavior in many experiments with complete-information games. We derive the model's implications in firstand second-price auctions with general information structures, compare them to equilibrium and Eyster and Rabin's (2005) "cursed equilibrium...
متن کاملDynamic system of strategic games
Maybe an event can't be modeled completely through one game but there is more chance with several games. With emphasis on players' rationality, we present new properties of strategic games, which result in production of other games. Here, a new attitude to modeling will be presented in game theory as dynamic system of strategic games and its some applications such as analysis of the clash betwe...
متن کامل