First-Mover Advantage in Two-Sided Competitions: An Experimental Comparison of Role-Assignment Rules

Kingston (1976) and Anderson (1977) show that the probability that a given contestant wins a best-of-2k+1 series of asymmetric, zero-sum, binary-outcome games is, for a large class of assignment rules, independent of which contestant is assigned the advantageous role in each component game. We design a laboratory experiment to test this hypothesis for four simple role-assignment rules. Despite play not uniformly conforming to equilibrium, our results show that the four assignment rules are observationally equivalent at the series level: the fraction of series won by a given contestant and all other series outcomes do not differ across the four rules.