The Process of Choice in Guessing Games

This paper employs a new experimental design to provide insight into strategic choice in one shot games. We incentivize and observe provisional choices in the 2/3 guessing game in the period after the structure of the game has been communicated. Early selections in this "strategic choice process" data provide insight into naive (L0) play, and support the standard assumption that such choices average 50. While average strategic sophistication rises over time, we identify significant individual differences in this respect. These differences appear to be broad-based: those whose strategic sophistication grows most in our experiment also perform best at separate learning tasks.