Feigning ignorance for long-term gains

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lee, Natalie
• 署名单位: University of Amsterdam
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2022.11.009
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 42-71
• 关键词: information; Spying; observability; dynamic games

摘要

In dynamic strategic interactions, a player who spies the opponent's actions might have incentives to feign ignorance and forgo immediate payoffs so that he can earn higher future payoffs by manipulating the opponent's suspicion. I model and experimentally implement the situation as a two-stage hide-and-seek game. A substantial share of the spying players fails to feign ignorance, despite the empirical suboptimality of the behavior and their largely correct predictions about opponents' suspicion. Subjects are highly heterogeneous in their tendency to feign ignorance and show only moderate learning. The players who are spied on hold empirically correct beliefs and mostly best-respond.(c) 2022 The Author. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).