We exploit a unique opportunity to study how a large population of players in the field learn to play a novel game with a complicated and non-intuitive mixed strategy equilibrium.  We argue that standard models of belief-based learning and reinforcement learning are unable to explain the data,...

The importance of categorical reasoning in human cognition is well-established in psychology and cognitive science, and it is generally acknowledged that one of the most important functions of categorization is to facilitate prediction. This paper provides a model of optimal categorization. In...

This paper studies categorizations that are optimal for the purpose of making predictions. A subject encounters an object (x,y). She observes the first component, x, and has to predict the second component, y. The space of objects is partitioned into categories. The subject determines what...