Implementation in Iterative Elimination of Obviously Dominated Strategies : An Experiment on King Solomon's Dilemma

“King Solomon's Dilemma” is based on a biblical story and this can be considered as an allocation problem for an indivisible object among two players. An allocation is first-best if a social planner wants to assign the object without payment to the player whose valuation is the highest. We experimentally compare the relative performance of the mechanism of Mihara (Japanese Economic Review, 63(3), 420 - 429, 2012) and a mechanism which we modify Mihara's mechanism. We find that a modified Mihara's mechanism relatively performs better than Mihara's mechanism from the following four view points: (1) the proportion of the first-best allocations; (2) the proportion of the right-player allocations; (3) net mean efficiency; and (4) players' behavior. In addition, our experiment suggests that before participating in the auction stage in our mechanism, players may find which strategy is best in the auction