While folk theorems for dynamic renewable common pool resource games sustain cooperation as an equilibrium, the possibility of reverting to violence to appropriate the resource destroys the incentives to cooperate, because of the expectation of conflict when resources are sufficiently depleted....

An experiment is designed to provide a snapshot of the strategies used by players in a repeated price competition game with a random continuation rule. One hundred pairs of subjects played the game over the Internet, with subjects having a few days to make their decisions in each round....

We analyze experimentally two sender-receiver games with conflictive preferences. In the first game, the sender can choose to tell the truth, to lie, or to remain silent. The latter strategy is costly and similar to an outside option. If sent, the receiver can either trust or distrust the...

A recent experimental study of Cai and Wang (2003) on strategic information transmission games reveals that subjects tend to transmit more information than predicted by the standard equilibrium analysis. To evidence that this overcommunication phenomenon can be explained in some situations in...

This paper examines strategic adaptation in participants’ behavior conditional on the type of their opponent. Participants played a constant-sum game for 100 rounds against each of three pattern-detecting computer algorithms designed to exploit regularities in human behavior such as...

This paper aspires to fill a conspicuous gap in the literature regarding learning in games — the absence of empirical verification of learning rules involving pattern recognition. Weighted fictitious play is extended to detect two-period patterns in opponents’ behavior and to comply with the...

By providing incentives for sellers to act in a trustworthy manner, reputation mechanisms in many online environments can mitigate moral-hazard problems when particular buyers and sellers interact infrequently. However, these mechanisms rely on buyers sharing their private information about...

We test infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma games with random continuation in the laboratory to capture the effect of strategic risk on co-operation. We propose a criterion building on Harsanyi and Selten's (1988) risk dominance concept and motivate it by three heuristic principles. Our...

Game theorists typically assume that changing a game's payoff levels - by adding the same constant to, or subtracting it from, all payoffs - should not affect behavior. While this invariance is an implication of the theory when payoffs mirror expected utilities, it is an empirical question when...

The paper presents the results of a novel experiment testing the effects of environment complexity on strategic behavior, using a centipede game. Behavior in the centipede game has been explained either by appealing to failures of backward induction or by calling for preferences that induce...