Game and decision theory start from rather strong premises. Preferences, represented by utilities, beliefs represented by probabilities, common knowledge and symmetric rationality as background assumptions are treated as “given.” A richer language enabling us to capture the process leading...

Standard equilibrium concepts in game theory find it difficult to explain the empirical evidence from a large number of static games, including the prisoner's dilemma game, the hawk-dove game, voting games, public goods games and oligopoly games. Under uncertainty about what others will do in...

In strategic situations, humans infer the state of mind of others, e.g., emotions or intentions, adapting their behavior appropriately. Nonetheless, evolutionary studies of cooperation typically focus only on reaction norms, e.g., tit for tat, whereby individuals make their next decisions by...

In terms of role assignment and informational characteristics, different contexts have been used when measuring distributional preferences. This could be problematic as contextual variance may inadvertently muddle the measurement process. We use a within-subjects design and systemically vary...

We test the empirical content of the assumption of preference dependent beliefs using a behavioral model of strategic decision making in which the rankings of individuals over final outcomes in simple games influence their beliefs over the opponent’s behavior. This approach— by analogy with...

An interaction system has a finite set of agents that interact pairwise, depending on the current state of the system. Symmetric decomposition of the matrix of interaction coefficients yields the representation of states by self-adjoint matrices and hence a spectral representation. As a result,...

In simple dyadic games such as rock, paper, scissors (RPS), people exhibit peculiar sequential dependencies across repeated interactions with a stable opponent. These regularities seem to arise from a mutually adversarial process of trying to outwit their opponent. What underlies this process,...

Game spaces in which an organism must repeatedly compete with an opponent for mutually exclusive outcomes are critical methodologies for understanding decision-making under pressure. In the non-transitive game rock, paper, scissors (RPS), the only technique that guarantees the lack of...

We propose a framework in order to econometrically estimate case-based learning and apply it to empirical data from twelve 2 × 2 mixed strategy equilibria experiments. Case-based learning allows agents to explicitly incorporate information available to the experimental subjects in a simple,...

I designed an experiment to study the persistence of the prevailing levels of reasoning across games. Instead of directly comparing the k-level(s) of reasoning for each game, I used cognitive load to manipulate the strategic environment by imposing variations on the subject's cost of reasoning...