Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: May, 2010, Volume 78, Issue 3

Does Experience Teach? Professionals and Minimax Play in the Lab

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA7970
p. 1143-1154

John Wooders

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.


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Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Does Experience Teach? Professionals and Minimax Play in the Lab"

This appendix contains tables and figures for the paper.