 Does Experience Teach? Professionals and Minimax Play in the LabEconometrica, 2010, vol. 78, issue 3, 1143-1154 Abstract: 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. Copyright 2010 The Econometric Society. Date: 2010 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecm:emetrp:v:78:y:2010:i:3:p:1143-1154 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Econometrica is currently edited by Guido Imbens More articles in Econometrica from Econometric Society Contact information at EDIRC. |
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