Naive Strategies in Competitive Games

Abstract

We investigate the behavior of players in a two-person competitive game. One player “hides” a treasure in one of four locations, and the other player “seeks” the treasure in one of these locations. The seeker wins if her choice matches the hider’s choice; the hider wins if it does not. According to the classical game-theoretic analysis, both players should choose each item with probability of.25. In contrast, we found that both hiders and seekers tended to avoid the endpoints. This bias produces a positive correlation between the players’ choices, giving the seeker a considerable advantage over the hider.

J.E.L Classification numbers: C7,C9.

This paper replaces working paper “Naive Strategies in Zero-Sum Games”, The Sackler Institute of Economic Studies, Tel-Aviv University, No. 17–93 (September, 1993).

We acknowledge support from United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Grant no. 1011–341, to the first author, and from the National Science Foundation, Grant no. SBR-9408684, to the second author.

We are grateful to Anat Alexandron, Tony Bastardi and Bradley Ruffle for their help.