An Experiment on Learning in a Multiple Games Environment

Printer-friendly version
Working paper
Author/s: 
Veronika Grimm and Friederike Mengel
Issue number: 
RM/09/007
Publisher: 
Maastricht University
Year: 
2009
We study experimentally how players learn to make decisions if they face many di erent (normal-form) games. Games are generated randomly from a uniform distribution in each of 100 rounds. We nd that agents do extrapo- late between games but learn to play strategically equivalent games in the same way. If either there are few games or if explicit information about the opponent's behavior is provided (or both) convergence to the unique Nash equilibrium gen- erally occurs. Otherwise this is not the case and play converges to a distribution of actions which is Non-Nash. Action choices, though, that cannot be explained by theoretical models of either belief-bundling or action bundling are never ob- served. Estimating di erent learning models we nd that Nash choices are best explained by ner categorizations than Non-Nash choices. Furthermore partic- ipants scoring better in the "Cognitive Re ection Test" choose Nash actions more often than other participants.
Developed by Paolo Gittoi