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Elicitation of Strategy Profiles in Large Group Coordination Games

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Darryl A. Seale  and
Amnon Rapoport
Darryl A. Seale*
Affiliation:
Department of Management, College of Business, University of Nevada Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, NV 89154-6009, USA
Amnon Rapoport*
Affiliation:
Department of Management and Policy, 405 McClelland, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721
*
email: dseale@ccmail.nevada.edu
email: amnon@uarizona.edu
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Abstract

The strategy method is an experimental procedure for eliciting a complete strategy of play for all information sets, not only the ones that happen to be reached during the course of a play of a game. We use it to elicit individual strategy profiles for a class of large group, market entry games in which the payoff for a player who enters on a given market capacity value decreases linearly in the difference between the capacity value and the corresponding number of entrants. Our results show that the aggregate frequencies of entry do not differ from previous results obtained under the more common decision method. Under both methods, the number of entrants across a large set of market capacity values is organized remarkably well by the equilibrium solution. In contrast, the individual profiles do not support mixed equilibrium play; only three of the sixty profiles suggest attempts at randomization or “mixing” between periods. About half of the individual profiles appear to converge, albeit slowly, to cutoff decision policies and more than a quarter of the profiles exhibit a variety of patterns that defy classification.

Keywords

coordination market entry gamesadaptive learningstrategy method
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , October 2000 , pp. 153 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

*

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

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