Boundary and interior equilibria: what drives convergence in a ‘beauty contest'?

We present an experimental game in the p-beauty framework. Building on the definitions of boundary and interior equilibria, we distinguish between ‘speed of convergence towards the game-theoretic equilibrium' and ‘deviations of the guesses from the game-theoretic equilibrium'. In contrast to earlier findings (Güth et al., 2002), we show that (i) interior equilibria initially produce smaller deviation of the guesses from the game-theoretic equilibrium compared to boundary equilibria; (ii) interior and boundary equilibria do not differ in the timeframe needed for convergence; (iii) the speed of convergence is higher in the boundary equilibrium.