Abstract
We investigate the behavior of players in a two-person competitive game. One player “hides” a treasure in one of four locations, and the other player “seeks” the treasure in one of these locations. The seeker wins if her choice matches the hider’s choice; the hider wins if it does not. According to the classical game-theoretic analysis, both players should choose each item with probability of.25. In contrast, we found that both hiders and seekers tended to avoid the endpoints. This bias produces a positive correlation between the players’ choices, giving the seeker a considerable advantage over the hider.
J.E.L Classification numbers: C7,C9.
This paper replaces working paper “Naive Strategies in Zero-Sum Games”, The Sackler Institute of Economic Studies, Tel-Aviv University, No. 17–93 (September, 1993).
We acknowledge support from United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Grant no. 1011–341, to the first author, and from the National Science Foundation, Grant no. SBR-9408684, to the second author.
We are grateful to Anat Alexandron, Tony Bastardi and Bradley Ruffle for their help.
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References
N. Christenfeld, Choices from identical options, Psychological Science, vol. 6, no. 1, 1995(50–55).
E. Shafir , and A. Tversky, “Thinking Through Uncertainty: Nonconsequentialism in Reasoning and Choice”. Cognitive Psychology, 24:449–474, 1992.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin — Heidelberg
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Rubinstein, A., Tversky, A., Heller, D. (1997). Naive Strategies in Competitive Games. In: Albers, W., Güth, W., Hammerstein, P., Moldovanu, B., van Damme, E. (eds) Understanding Strategic Interaction. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60495-9_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-60495-9_30
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