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Does seeing more deeply into a game increase one's chances of winning?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

C. Nicholas McKinney Jr.  and
John B. Van Huyck
C. Nicholas McKinney Jr.*
Affiliation:
Rhodes College, Department of Economics and Business Administration, Memphis, TN 38112
John B. Van Huyck
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University, Department of Economics, College Station, TX 77843
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The substantively rational value of the games studied in this paper does not help predict subject performance in the experiment at all. An accurate model must account for the cognitive ability of the people playing the game. This paper investigates whether the variation in measured rationality bounds is correlated with the probability of winning when playing against another person in games that exceed both players’ estimated rationality bound. Does seeing deeper into a game matter when neither player can see to the end of the game? Subjects with higher measured bounds win 63 percent of the time and the larger the difference the more frequently they win.

Keywords

Bounded rationalityPerfect informationNimHuman behaviorExperiment

JEL classification

C92: Laboratory, Group Behavior C72: Noncooperative Games D82: Asymmetric and Private Information • Mechanism Design
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 9 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Behavioral Economics , September 2006 , pp. 297 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-006-9129-x.

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