Testing Game Theory

Experimentalists frequently claim that human subjects playing games in the laboratory violate such solution concepts as Nash equilibrium and subgame perfection. This claim is premature. What has been rejected are certain joint hypotheses about preferences, knowledge, and behavior. This note strives to clarify some issues in connection with laboratory experiments, from the viewpoint of non-cooperative game theory, and provides a sketch for a research program for experimental testing of game-theoretic solution concepts.