Experimental Tests of a Sequential Equilibrium Reputation Model.

The authors find that subjects' behavior in an incomplete-information, repeated-game experiment is roughly a sequent ial equilibrium. The deviations from sequential equilibrium can be ex plained by the existence of a "homemade prior" probability (about 1 7 percent) that players will cooperate even when they should not. The authors conclude that equilibrium concepts which are more complicate d than Nash (such as sequential) can describe individual behavior wel l enough that theories using such equilibrium concepts are plausible. Copyright 1988 by The Econometric Society.