Quantitative Economics

Journal Of The Econometric Society

Edited by: Stéphane Bonhomme • Print ISSN: 1759-7323 • Online ISSN: 1759-7331

Quantitative Economics: Jul, 2023, Volume 14, Issue 3

Expertise, Gender, and Equilibrium Play

https://doi.org/10.3982/QE1563
p. 981-1020

Romain Gauriot, Lionel Page, John Wooders

Mixed‐strategy Nash equilibrium is the cornerstone of our understanding of strategic situations that require decision makers to be unpredictable. Using data from nearly half a million serves over 3000 tennis matches, and data on player rankings from the ATP and WTA, we examine whether the behavior of professional tennis players is consistent with equilibrium. We find that win rates conform remarkably closely to the theory for men, but conform somewhat less neatly for women. We show that the behavior in the field of more highly ranked (i.e., better) players conforms more closely to theory. We show that the statistical tests used in the prior related literature are not valid for large samples like ours; we develop a novel statistical test that is valid and show, via Monte Carlo simulations, that it is more powerful against the alternative that receivers follows a nonequilibrium mixture.


Full Content: Print

Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Expertise, Gender, and Equilibrium Play"

Romain Gauriot, Lionel Page, and John Wooders

This online appendix contains material not found within the manuscript.

Supplement to "Expertise, Gender, and Equilibrium Play"

Romain Gauriot, Lionel Page, and John Wooders

This zip file contains the replication files for the manuscript.