Research on decision making under uncertainty demonstrates that intuitive ideas of randomness depart systematically from the laws of chance. Two such departures involving random sequences of events have been documented in the laboratory, the gambler’s fallacy and the hot hand. This study presents results from the field, using videotapes of patrons gambling in a casino, to examine the existence and extent of these biases in naturalistic settings. We find small but significant biases in our population, consistent with those observed in the lab. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005perceptions of randomness, uncertainty, field study,

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Coordination behavior is studied experimentally in a class of noncooperative market entry games featuring symmetric players, complete information, zero entry costs, and several randomly presented values of the market capacity. Once the market capacity becomes publicly known, each player must decide privately whether to enter the market and receive a payoff, which increases linearly in the difference between the market capacity and the number of entrants, or stay out. Payoffs for staying out are either positive, giving rise to the domain of gains, or negative, giving rise to the domain of losses. The major findings are substantial individual differences that do not diminish with practice, aggregate behavior that is organized extremely well in both the domains of gains and losses by the Nash equilibrium solution, and variations in the population action strategies with repeated play of the stage game that are accounted for by a variant of an adaptive learning model due to Roth and Erev (1995).Coordination Behavior, Market Entry Games, Adaptive Learning Models, Games with Multiple Equilibria, Experimental Economics

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