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Competing Against Experienced and Inexperienced Players

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Robert L. Slonim
Robert L. Slonim*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Case Western Reserve University, 11119 Bellflower Rd., Cleveland, OH 44106
*
email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In certain markets success may depend on how well participants anticipate the behavior of other participants who have varying amounts of experience. Understanding if and how people's behavior depends on competitors’ level of experience is important since in most markets participants have varying amounts of experience. Examining data from two new experimental studies similar to the beauty contest game first studied by Nagel (1995), the results indicate that (1) players with no experience behave the same against competitors with and without experience but (2) players quickly learn to condition their behavior on competitors’ experience level, causing (3) behavior to stop moving toward the equilibrium whenever new players enter the game and (4) experienced players to earn more money than less experienced players. The paper discusses the implications of the results for understanding and modeling behavior in markets in which participants have different amounts of experience.

Keywords

game theorylearningexperimental methods

JEL classification

C7: Game Theory and Bargaining Theory C9: Design of Experiments
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 2005 , pp. 55 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 Economic Science Association

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