A new working paper by Philipp Külpmann and Christoph Kuzmics "On the Predictive Power of Theories of One-Shot Play" is available on SSRN.
Abstract
We aim to test the predictive power of theories of one-shot play in games (subjects playing a game exactly once). We consider a variety of such theories and fix their parameter estimates from the recent large scale meta-analysis of Wright and Leyton-Brown (2017). We compare these theories in terms of their predictive power, measured in terms of the log-likelihood, for a series of symmetric hawk-dove games played in the lab. We find that even for such a narrow class of games no theory is uniformly better than all others across all treatments. Furthermore the theory that provides the highest overall log-likelihood for our data is Nash equilibrium with risk aversion, with an estimated risk aversion parameter taken from Hey and Orme (1994) and its replication in Harrison and Rutström (2009). In particular, it significantly beats the two “winning” theories in Wright and Leyton-Brown (2017) based on quantal level k or cognitive hierarchy models.