American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Fatal Attraction: Salience, Naïveté, and Sophistication in Experimental "Hide-and-Seek" Games
American Economic Review
vol. 97,
no. 5, December 2007
(pp. 1731–1750)
Abstract
"Hide-and-seek" games are zero-sum two-person games in which one player wins by matching the other's decision and the other wins by mismatching. Although such games are often played on cultural or geographic "landscapes" that frame decisions nonneutrally, equilibrium ignores such framing. This paper reconsiders the results of experiments by Rubinstein, Tversky, and others whose designs model nonneutral landscapes, in which subjects deviate systematically from equilibrium in response to them. Comparing alternative explanations theoretically and econometrically suggests that the deviations are well explained by a structural nonequilibrium model of initial responses based on "level-k" thinking, suitably adapted to nonneutral landscapes. (JEL C72, C92)Citation
Crawford, Vincent, P., and Nagore Iriberri. 2007. "Fatal Attraction: Salience, Naïveté, and Sophistication in Experimental "Hide-and-Seek" Games." American Economic Review, 97 (5): 1731–1750. DOI: 10.1257/aer.97.5.1731Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- C72 Noncooperative Games
- C92 Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Group Behavior