Re-examination of team’s play in a mixed-strategy game experiment

ABSTRACT

Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2008) found that the behaviour of professional soccer players in two-person zero-sum games is consistent with minimax play, while Wooders (2010) re-examined their data and found inconsistencies in several respects. This study applies a similar analysis of Wooders (2010) to the experimental data in Okano (2013), which found that the behaviour of teams of two-student subjects conforms closely to minimax play, and addresses whether teams exhibit the same inconsistencies as professionals. Teams were found to have consistency with minimax play, with no tendencies similar to those of professionals.

KEYWORDS:

• Experimental game
• team
• minimax
• zero-sum

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C72
• C92

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Wooders (2010) also found that student subjects exhibit a positive correlation between halves for Joker.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) under Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research [25590046].