A Comment on “David and Goliath: An Analysis on Asymmetric Mixed-Strategy Games and Experimental Evidence”.

In this note, we characterize the full set of Equilibria of the 2-firm patent race analyzed by Amaldoss and Jain (Management Science, 48(8), August 2002, pp. 972-991). Contrary to Amaldoss and Jain’s (2002) claim, we show that the equilibrium is not always unique and that the set of Equilibria is non-robust to changes in the (discrete) set of available strategies. In some Equilibria, the qualitative results are the reverse of those in the only equilibrium Amaldoss and Jain identify. Our findings have important implications for the analysis of the data from Amaldoss and Jain’s experiments, as well as other experiments appearing in the literature.