When the editors of Experimental Economics received news of Amnon Rapoport's passing in 2022, we immediately thought it appropriate to honor his contributions to the community of experimental researchers in economics, psychology, and related disciplines with a special issue. Amnon's impacts in social science research are wide-spread and profound. They span a broad set of topics, largely under the theme of understanding human decision making in complex environments that are challenging to analyze theoretically and that require careful and thoughtful designs to investigate experimentally. He was a pioneer in using experimental methods to understand the world, and always had an open mind to novel questions and approaches.

To investigate whether attention responds rationally to strategic incentives, we experimentally implement a buyer-seller game in which a fully informed seller makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to a buyer who faces cognitive costs to process information about the offer's value. We isolate the impact of seller strategies on buyer attention by exogenously varying the seller's outside option, which leads sellers to price high more often. We find that buyers respond by making fewer mistakes conditional on value, which suggests that buyers exert higher attentional effort in response to the increased strategic incentives for paying attention. We show that a standard model of rational inattention based on Shannon mutual information cannot fully explain this change in buyer behavior. However, we identify another class of rational inattention models consistent with this behavioral pattern.

This article presents a new approach to understanding strategic decision making inspired by the mathematics of quantum theory. Empirical support for this new approach is based on five different puzzling findings from past work on the prisoner dilemma game including the disjunction effect, the interference of predictions on actions in simultaneous and sequential games, question order effect, and the effects of cheap promises. Eight different quantum models are described, which purport to account for these puzzling findings. The competing models are systematically compared with respect to their capability of accounting for the five empirical findings.

In a dyadic game, strategic asymmetric dominance occurs when a player's preference for one strategy A relative to another B is systematically increased by the addition of a third strategy Z, strictly dominated by A but not by B. There are theoretical and empirical grounds for believing that this effect should decline over repetitions, and other grounds for believing, on the contrary, that it should persist. To investigate this question experimentally, 30 participant pairs played 50 rounds of one symmetric and two asymmetric 3 × 3 games each having one strategy strictly dominated by one other, and a control group played 2 × 2 versions of the same games with dominated strategies removed. The strategic asymmetric dominance effect was observed in the repeated-choice data: dominant strategies in the 3 × 3 versions were chosen more frequently than the corresponding strategies in the 2 × 2 versions. Time series analysis revealed a significant decline in the effect over repetitions in the symmetric game only. Supplementary verbal protocol analysis helped to clarify the players’ reasoning and to explain the results.

Individuals were found to anonymously predict positive election outcomes for their preferred candidate. Yet, there is little scientific knowledge about election predictions made in the context of same-camp political communications (i.e., partisan communications) that are presumably meant to encourage other supporters. In five studies of low-information elections and a study of hypothetical U.S. elections (n = 1889), we found that people tended to communicate favorable forecasts to others sharing their view, compared to the neutral point and to the actual election outcomes. On the other hand, negative framing reduced the positivity of forecasts in these communications to the extent that it led most participants to predict an election loss. This occurred in response to a single addressee acting discordantly and even more strongly when the election results were phrased as a drop. When both positive and negative framing options were available, this still negativity affected participants’ predictions even though only a minority selected the negative framing option. Thus, people tend to make optimistic election predictions in partisan communications, but this pattern is easily manipulable given subtle changes in the forecasting prompt, either by negative framing or selectable positive and negative framing.

Gallice and Monzón (Econ J 129(621):2137–2154, 2019) present present a natural environment that sustains full co-operation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of self-interested agents. They demonstrate that in a sequential public goods game, where agents lack knowledge of their position in the sequence but can observe some predecessors’ actions, full contribution emerges in equilibrium due to agents’ incentive to induce potential successors to follow suit. In this study, we aim to test the theoretical predictions of this model through an economic experiment. We conducted three treatments, varying the amount of information about past actions that a subject can observe, as well as their positional awareness. Through rigorous structural econometric analysis, we found that approximately 25% of the subjects behaved in line with the theoretical predictions. However, we also observed the presence of alternative behavioural types among the remaining subjects. The majority were classified as conditional co-operators, showing a willingness to cooperate based on others’ actions. Some subjects exhibited altruistic tendencies, while only a small minority engaged in free-riding behaviour.

We study how people solve the optimal stopping problem of buying an airline ticket. Over a set of problems, people were given 12 opportunities to buy a ticket ranging from 12 months before travel to 1 day before. The distributions from which prices were sampled changed over time, following patterns observed in industry analysis of flight ticket pricing. We characterize the optimal decision process in terms of a set of thresholds that set the maximum purchase price for each time point. In a behavioral analysis, we find that the average price people pay is above the optimal, that there is little evidence people learn over the sequence of problems, but that there are likely significant individual differences in the way people make decisions. In a model-based analysis, we propose a set of nine possible decision strategies, based on how purchasing probabilities change according to time and the price of the ticket. Using Bayesian latent-mixture methods, we infer the strategies used by the participants, finding that some use purely time-based strategies, while others also attend to the price of the tickets. We conclude by noting the limitations in the strategies as accounts of people's decision making, highlighting the need to consider sequential effects and other context effects on purchasing behavior.

This study investigates the mechanisms driving the effectiveness of free-form communication in promoting cooperation within a sequential social dilemma game. We hypothesize that the self-constructing nature of free-form communication enhances the sincerity of messages and increases the disutility of dishonoring promises. Our experimental results demonstrate that free-form messages outperform both restricted promises and treatments where subjects select and use previously constructed free-form messages. Interestingly, we find that selected free-form messages and restricted promises achieve similar levels of cooperation. We observe that free-form messages with higher sincerity increase the likelihood of high-price and high-quality choices, thereby promoting cooperation. These messages frequently include promises and honesty, while threats do not promote cooperation. Our findings emphasize the crucial role of the self-constructed nature of free-form messages in promoting cooperation, exceeding the impact of message content compared to restricted communication protocols.

The present study transforms subjective conflict perceptions into formally defined games, tests the reliability of the transformation, and explores the properties of several conflict scenarios. To this end we: (i) develop an illustration-based method that transforms implicit perceptions of expected outcomes and experiences into sets of structured numerical values, termed subjective game structures; (ii) develop a reliability index that compares the properties of two subjective games, allowing to test the consistency of repeatedly elicited games; (iii) empirically test game perceptions across eight conflict scenarios; and (iv) interpret the results in terms of two game taxonomies. The results reveal the capacity of the applied methods to transform vague social scenarios into reliable formal games, point to natural solutions, and show the distribution of games that characterizes each conflict scenario. The newly developed model and tools provide a potent instrument for studying a diverse array of social interactions, ranging from interpersonal relations to trade, political conflicts, and war. They represent invaluable resources for conducting polls, examining implicit attitudes, and assisting in the formulation of political, commercial, and social policies.

We introduce and test a stylized model of dynamic pricing under duopolistic competition. In our model, a consumer receives alternating price offers between two retailers over an indefinite number of periods so that the game or “season” terminates with a fixed probability after each period. The two retailers do not know the valuation of the consumer for the good they are competing to sell to the consumer, but they have common knowledge about the probability distribution of the valuation. Our equilibrium analysis suggests that price offers decrease exponentially across periods over the season. Moreover, when there are multiple consumers in the game, as long as their valuations are ex ante independently and identically distributed, the equilibrium predictions are the same regardless of the number of consumers. An experiment on the model showed that subjects acting as retailers often overpriced relative to equilibrium predictions. In addition, the theoretical invariance with respect to the number of consumers did not hold: consumers seemed to be more prone to strategic waiting in the first period of the season when there were multiple consumers (compared with when there was only a single consumer), leading to a decrease in the per-consumer payoff of the retailer who made the price offer in the first period and a corresponding increase in per-consumer payoff of the other retailer. There is also evidence of within-session evolution that led to lower retailer prices that were closer to equilibrium predictions, and higher tendency for consumer strategic waiting, as the session progressed.