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Naive play and the process of choice in guessing games

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Marina Agranov ,
Andrew Caplin  and
Chloe Tergiman
Marina Agranov
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology and the Center for Experimental Social Science, Pasadena, USA
Andrew Caplin
Affiliation:
New York University and the Center for Experimental Social Science, New York, USA
Chloe Tergiman*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia and the Center for Experimental Social Science, Vancouver, Canada
*
e-mail: chloejt@gmail.com
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Abstract

There is growing evidence that not all experimental subjects understand their strategic environment. We introduce a “choice process” (CP) protocol that aids in identifying these subjects. This protocol elicits in an incentive compatible manner provisional choices as players internalize their decision making environment. We implement the CP protocol in the modified 2/3 guessing game and use it to pinpoint players that are naive by identifying those who make weakly dominated choices some time into the play. At all time horizons these players average close to 50. This is consistent with the assumption in Level-K theory that the least sophisticated subjects (the naive ones) play uniformly over the [1–100] action space. In contrast, sophisticated players show evidence of increased understanding as time passes. We find that the CP protocol mirrors play in multiple setups with distinct time constraints. Hence it may be worth deploying more broadly to understand the interaction between decision time and choice.

Keywords

Experiment2/3 Guessing gameLevel 0 play

JEL classification

C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior C81: Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Microeconomic Data • Data Access
Type
Original Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , December 2015 , pp. 146 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2015

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40881-015-0003-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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