Does Experience Teach? Professionals and Minimax Play in the Lab
成果类型：
Article
署名作者：
Wooders, John
署名单位：
University of Arizona
刊物名称：
ECONOMETRICA
ISSN/ISSBN：
0012-9682
DOI：
10.3982/ECTA7970
发表日期：
2010
页码：
1143-1154
关键词：
摘要：
Does expertise in strategic behavior obtained in the field transfer to the abstract setting of the laboratory? Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2008) argued that the behavior of professional soccer players in mixed-strategy games conforms closely to minimax play, while the behavior of students (who are presumably novices in strategic situations requiring unpredictability) does not. We reexamine their data, showing that the play of professionals is inconsistent with the minimax hypothesis in several respects: (i) professionals follow nonstationary mixtures, with action frequencies that are negatively correlated between the first and the second half of the experiment, (ii) professionals tend to switch between under- and overplaying an action relative to its equilibrium frequency, and (iii) the distribution of action frequencies across professionals is far from the distribution implied by minimax. In each respect, the behavior of students conforms more closely to the minimax hypothesis.