In the much-studied Centipede Game, which resembles the Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma, two players successively choose between (1) cooperating, by continuing play, or (2) defecting and terminating play. The subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium implies that play terminates on the first move, even...

We conduct a field experiment in which highly-ranked chess players play the centipede game in a natural setting. This game represents one of the main paradoxes of backward induction. In the experiment two players alternately are faced with the decision of either taking an exponentially growing...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of two instruments designed to defer termination in the centipede game: an insurance against termination by the opponent, and an option to offer the opponent a bonus for not terminating the game. The rational prediction in both cases is passing until...

Informal exchange of information among competitors has been well-documented in a variety of industries, and one's expectation of reciprocity shown to be a key determinant. We use an indeterminate horizon centipede game to establish a feedback loop in the laboratory and show that an individual's...

We examine differences in behavior between subjects interacting with a member of either the same or different identity group in both a centipede game and a series of stag hunt games. We find evidence that subjects interacting with outgroup members are more likely to behave as though...

We propose a solution concept for a class of extensive form games with ambiguity. Specifically we consider multi-stage games. Players have CEU preferences. The associated ambiguous beliefs are revised by Generalized Bayesian Updating. We assume individuals take account of possible changes in...

We study population game dynamics under which each revising agent tests each of his strategies a fixed number of times, with each play of each strategy being against a newly drawn opponent, and chooses the strategy whose total payoff was highest. In the Centipede game, these best experienced...

Reciprocal cooperation can be studied in the Centipede game, in which two players alternate in choosing between a cooperative GO move and a non-cooperative STOP move. GO sustains the interaction and increases the player pair's total payoff while incurring a small personal cost; STOP terminates...

In the present work, I adopt the cognitive hierarchy approach to analyze the centipede game. To this end, I present and study an extensive-form version of Camerer et al.'s (2004) original normal-form model. The resulting predictions are evaluated empirically using laboratory data borrowed from a...

We study a class of trust-based cooperation dilemmas that evolve in continuous time. Characteristic of these dilemmas is that as long as all n players continue to cooperate, their payoffs increase monotonically over time. Simultaneously, the temptation to defect increases too, as the first...