IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp10518.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Using Response Times to Measure Strategic Complexity and the Value of Thinking in Games

Author

Listed:
  • Gill, David

    (Purdue University)

  • Prowse, Victoria L.

    (Purdue University)

Abstract

Response times are a simple low-cost indicator of the process of reasoning in strategic games (Rubinstein, 2007; Rubinstein, 2016). We leverage the dynamic nature of response-time data from repeated strategic interactions to measure the strategic complexity of a situation by how long people think on average when they face that situation (where we define situations according to the characteristics of play in the previous round). We find that strategic complexity varies significantly across situations, and we find considerable heterogeneity in how responsive subjects' thinking times are to complexity. We also study how variation in response times at the individual level across rounds affects strategic behavior and success. We find that 'overthinking' is detrimental to performance: when a subject thinks for longer than she would normally do in a particular situation, she wins less frequently and earns less. The behavioral mechanism that drives the reduction in performance is a tendency to move away from Nash equilibrium behavior.

Suggested Citation

  • Gill, David & Prowse, Victoria L., 2017. "Using Response Times to Measure Strategic Complexity and the Value of Thinking in Games," IZA Discussion Papers 10518, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
  • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10518
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp10518.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sebastian J. Goerg & Sebastian Kube & Jonas Radbruch, 2019. "The Effectiveness of Incentive Schemes in the Presence of Implicit Effort Costs," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(9), pages 4063-4078, September.
    2. Grabiszewski, Konrad & Horenstein, Alex, 2020. "Effort is not a monotonic function of skills: Results from a global mobile experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 176(C), pages 634-652.
    3. Alaoui, Larbi & Janezic, Katharina A. & Penta, Antonio, 2020. "Reasoning about others' reasoning," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 189(C).
    4. Recalde, María P. & Riedl, Arno & Vesterlund, Lise, 2018. "Error-prone inference from response time: The case of intuitive generosity in public-good games," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 160(C), pages 132-147.
    5. Cary Frydman & Ian Krajbich, 2022. "Using Response Times to Infer Others’ Private Information: An Application to Information Cascades," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(4), pages 2970-2986, April.
    6. Grabiszewski, Konrad & Horenstein, Alex, 2022. "Measuring tree complexity with response times," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 98(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    response time; decision time; thinking time; strategic complexity; game theory; strategic games; repeated games; beauty contest; cognitive ability; personality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp10518. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.