We study experimentally the nature of dominance violations in three minimalist dominancesolvable guessing games. We examine how subjects’ reported reasoning processes translate into their stated choices and beliefs about others’ choices, and how both reasoning processes and choices relate to their measured cognitive and personality characteristics. Only about a third of subjects reason in line with dominance; they all make dominant choices and almost all expect others to do so. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of subjects reason inconsistently with dominance, yet a quarter of them actually make dominant choices and half of those expect others to do so. Reasoning errors are more likely for subjects with lower ability to maintain and allocate attention, as measured by working memory, and for subjects with lower intrinsic motivation and premeditation attitude. Dominance-incompatible reasoning arises mainly from subjects misrepresenting the strategic nature (payoff structure) of the guessing games.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economic Institute, Prague in its series CERGE-EI Working Papers with number
wp347.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games C92 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Group Behavior D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search, Learning, and Information
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)