Naive play and the process of choice in guessing games

We introduce a new experimental design to provide insight into strategic choice in one shot games. We incentivize and observe provisional choices in the 2/3 guessing game in the period after the structure of the game has been communicated. We define as naive those who play dominated strategies well after we have communicated the structure of the game. We identify a high proportion of such players (more than 40% of subjects). We find strong support for the standard assumption that naive types’ choices average 50. This holds not only at the end of the game, but throughout the period of contemplation. Unlike their naive counterparts, strategic players show evidence of increasing sophistication as the period of contemplation increases. JEL Codes: C72, C92, D83.