In many experiments, the Nash equilibrium concept seems not to predict well. One reason may be that players have non-selfish preferences over outcomes. As a consequence, even when they are told what the material payoffs of the game are, mutual knowledge of preferences may not be satisfied. We...

We introduce a simple procedure to be used for selecting the strategies most likely to be played by inexperienced agents who interact in one shot 2x2 games. We start with an axiomatic description of a function that may capture players' beliefs. Various proposals connected with the concept of...

In this paper we test the effect of descriptive "features" on initial strategic behavior in normal form games, where "descriptive" are all those features that can be modified without altering the (Nash) equilibrium structure of a game. We observe that our experimental subjects behave according...

We introduce a set-valued solution concept, M equilibrium, to capture empirical regularities from over half a century of game-theory experiments. We show M equilibrium serves as a meta theory for various models that hitherto were considered unrelated. M equilibrium is empirically robust and,...

The attack and defense game is a game in which an attacker (a group of attackers) has an incentive to revise the status quo and a defender (a group of defenders) wants to protect it. The asymmetry in objectives creates incompatible interests and results in a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium....

We report some experiments conducted to test whether ambiguity influences behavior in a coordination game. We study the behavior of subjects in the presence of ambiguity and attempt to determine whether they prefer to choose an ambiguity safe option. We find that this strategy, which is not...

The Aumann (1990) conjecture states that cheap-talk messages do not necessarily help to coordinate on efficient Nash equilibria. In an experimental test of Aumann’s conjecture, Charness (2000) found that cheap-talk messages facilitate coordination when they precede the action, but not when...