American Economic Review Vol. 109 No. 12 2019
Predicting and Understanding Initial Play
open access
Abstract
We use machine learning to uncover regularities in the initial play of matrix games. We first train a prediction algorithm on data from past experiments. Examining the games where our algorithm predicts correctly, but existing economic models don’t, leads us to add a parameter to the best performing model that improves predictive accuracy. We then observe play in a collection of new “ algorithmically generated” games, and learn that we can obtain even better predictions with a hybrid model that uses a decision tree to decide game-by-game which of two economic models to use for prediction.
- DOI
- 10.1257/aer.20180654
- Volume
- 109
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 4112-4141
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref