FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGE IN TWO-SIDED COMPETITIONS: AN EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON OF ROLE-ASSIGNMENT RULES

Bradley Ruffle and Oscar Volij ()

No 1208, Working Papers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics

Abstract: Kingston (1976) and Anderson (1977) show that the probability that a given contestant wins a best-of-2k+1 series of asymmetric, zero-sum, binary-outcome games is, for a large class of assignment rules, independent of which contestant is assigned the advantageous role in each component game. We design a laboratory experiment to test this hypothesis for four simple role-assignment rules. Despite the fact that play does not uniformly conform to the equilibrium, our results show that the four assignment rules are observationally equivalent at the series level: the fraction of series won by a given contestant and all other series outcomes do not differ across the four rules.

Keywords: experimental economics; two-sided competitions; best-of series (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D02 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2012
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-ind and nep-net
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bgu:wpaper:1208

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